Brazil’s economy has fallen further into its worst ever recession, contracting by 3.6 percent in 2016…
…Brazil’s economy is now eight percent smaller than it was in December 2014.
Recently, there was a legislative coup in Brazil, but that was a symptom, not a cause, as are Venezuela’s problems, the electoral reversal in Argentina, and so on.
All that is required to understand what is happening is this chart of commodity prices.
Bloomberg 5 years commodity index March 8 2017
We have a very foolish economy. The developed world has been in austerity since 2008, China does not have a rich enough middle class to take up demand. Without demand for goods and services in the developed world, commodity prices have crashed.
Our lords and masters don’t want growth they can’t capture, and they value low wages and debt-slavery more than they do a thriving economy. As a result, the economies which prospered by supplying commodities to China and other manufacturers have stumbled and crashed out. This simple fact is behind many headlines which seem unrelated to it, including virtually every change of government in South America.
A globalized economy is moronic. It makes countries dependent on policies over which they have no control. There is virtually nothing that Brazil’s government can do about this (though engaging in austerity of their own is stupid); nor was there a damn thing Venezuela could do about it (though, yes, the Bolivarian economy was mismanaged, something I said as far back as 2004).
This is by design. Our elites don’t want national elites to be able to make policy. As a result, there are only two nations which approach full sovereignty in the world: the United States and China. Only they are powerful enough and rich enough to make unilateral moves without suffering vast consequences (and maybe not even them). The EU could almost be sovereign, if it wasn’t run by ideological morons, but it isn’t, and Russia has enough resources and military power to have some sovereignty, and that’s basically it.
And so, the Brazilians will suffer what they must, because however large and rich they think they are, they are still a non-sovereign state in the ways that matter in our world.
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