Archive for February 26, 2016

Brazil’s Economic Downturn Deepens

It doesn’t seem so very long ago that we were discussing the economic successes of emerging nations like Brazil.  From Europe we looked across at huge growth rates, rising living standards and a vibrant economy with a sense of extreme jealously.

However Brazil is now facing much bleaker economic prospects and it is a prime example of how quickly market sentiment can turn against an economy. The risks were always there, in this blog we highlighted here the fact that much of the success in Latin American countries was due to US economic policies – which meant that there was always a lack of genuine fundamentals underlying the growth. Much of the investment in these emerging countries was simply driven out of the US and Europe by very low interest and bond rates, when stability returned then the investment dried up in places like Brazil too.

The economic prospects for Brazil continued on a downward slope with this weeks decision for the credit rating agency Moody downgrading Brazil’s sovereign debt status to junk. The decision in itself will have little consequence, partly because it was anticipated and had largely been already priced into the markets. That’s not likely to be much relief though, more simply a confirmation of the bleak prospects of the Brazilian economy as a whole.

The reality is that Brazil has simply been spending too much with huge levels of debt and an ongoing fiscal deficit making it even bigger. As always in these situations, the talk is of a debt default which could be the catalyst for even more pressure on the country’s currency and a deepening recession.

Only a few years ago Brazil’s economy was growing at over 4% a year, whilst many other economies in the world were basically stagnant. Now that growth has been reversed and this year it is expected that it will contract by around 3-4% this year. This would represent Brazil’s worse recession in more than a hundred years, and with little indication of a turnaround the deficit is likely to increase.

The political situation is also unlikely to offer any relief for Brazilians, which desperately needs strong policies to deal with the economic crisis. However if you invest a few short minutes in looking at the Brazilian media online, possible with an online IP changer then you’ll see that there’s little sign of this happening. As one correspondent highlighted, the report by Moody’s is like a medical report which states the patient is sick yet is maintaining the same lifestyle which caused the problem.

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