Posted on 03/17/2016 9:31:18 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
You can't make this stuff up.
A current president shields a former president from investigation by appointing him to her cabinet. Then a judge annuls the appointment.
Billionaires, corporate execs and politicians are jailed in a massive corruption scandal. Huge protests call for the impeachment of the president, Dilma Rousseff. Oh, and the economy is tanking while its stock market is soaring.
This is the story of Brazil.
Once a star economic performer, Brazil is now deep in recession, sparked by the gargantuan bribery scandal at Petrobras, the state-run oil company, and a sharp decline in commodity prices.
Unemployment is rising, inflation is up by double digits and the currency lost 32% of its value last year. At the same time, Brazilian stocks are rallying on hopes that Rousseff will be impeached, giving way to a more investor-friendly regime.
It's been a whirlwind couple weeks for South America's largest country. If you're just catching up, here are some key dates:
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
BRICS who?
Didn’t Obama guarantee a $2 billion federal loan to Petrobas a few years back? I seem to remember there was some Soros connection, too...
Lula was the previous president, a socialist. She appointed him to her cabinet and phoned that fact to him. The phone call was bugged by a corruption investigation.
A minister can only be charged and tried in the Brazilian Supreme Court, not in the regular venues. So her act gave him an immunity from corruption charges.
The irony: When Lula was a younger socialist/communist, he supposedly said: “When a poor man steals, he goes to jail; when a rich man steals, he becomes a minister.”
Self-prophetic.
Brazil is a socialist, progressive nanny-state. Government controls most economic decisions.
Corruption and rent-seeking is the unavoidable result. there is no way around it.
The USA is not that different, except for one big difference - we can produce massive debt in our own currency, and the world must accept it, for now anyway.
And the Olympics are due to start in Rio in August...
BRICS, huh.
Was it Churchill who said “Brazil is the economic powerhouse of the future, and always will be”?
The Olympics start in Rio in a couple of months and almost nothing will be ready. This will be worse than Athens. The water is so polluted and dangerous, that many top athletes are considering not competing. Crime is so rampant near some of the construction sites that workers are refusing to go there.
Brazil is in shambles, and Lula (the former President who was being shielded by the current President) was a major part of its current crisis.
How refreshing.
Soros bought in big with Petrobras at the time of the BP mess in the Gulf.
It's going to get worse!
Sounds like kinda like a crime syndicate. Oh wait it is
Maybe Mitt can go help them with the Olympics?!
That’s actually not a bad idea. Mitt saved the Salt Lake City Olympics. I have a lot of problems with Mitt Romney, but he really is a very effective organizer who can handle big projects and pressure. Trump is the same way in that regard.
But I don’t know if either of them could work through the entrenched problems that Rio faces.
I agree.
I’ll bet Trump could fix it!
No doubt, with commodity prices (oil, especially) down, the payments to the pols have lagged...( If you have a structured settlement, but you need cash now, call...)
Among other problems, Brazil has some seriously filthy bodies of water, wide open to the public. Brazil has known about the polution for quite some time, but has no EPA equivalent with the same power. I find it surprising that so many American Olympic contestants have decided to ‘just not dwell upon’ the dangers. Oh, and then there’s that new Zika thing too.
Brazil has the world’s first first sustainable biofuels economy (ethanol). As we can see that’s working out just great for them. /s
Brazil made their economy all about Commodities and exports to China. You live by the sword you die by the sword.
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