IT'S TIME FOR AMERICA TO WAKE UP...TO THE RISING GIANT IN THE SOUTH

Is Brazil's Economy Getting to hot?

BILLIONAIRES

Is Brazil’s Economy Getting Too Hot?

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Last night 60 Minutes featured a segment on Brazil entitled “The World’s Next Economic Superpower.” Eike Batista, Brazil’s richest man and the world’s eighth richest man (profiled by Forbes  in March) told Steve Kroft that it’s time for Americans to “wake up” to the economic giant to their south.

Many Americans have already been awake to Brazil for at least some time.

Just today, General Electric demonstrated its interest in Brazil when it announced a plan to buy subsea pipeline manufacturer Wellstream Holdings, which derives a “substantial portion” of revenues from Brazil, for $1.3 billion.

Get It Together Brazil | World Cup Protests

Brazil appears to have hit a hiccup on the way to the World Cup taking place next year.  In all honesty the government and big investors should have seen this coming.

They have been lucky all of these years to have a (for the most part) population pacified enough to put up with the over-the-top corruption and blatant misuse of public funds.  Now it appears that the relatively quick completion of shiny new multi million dollar soccer stadiums across the country has provided a collective focus for the frustrations of many.

Citizens in this country are accustomed to third-rate construction jobs that tend to go over schedule and budget however the sudden appearance of first-rate quality stadiums all over the country present a contrast that is difficult to ignore.  In Salvador da Bahia the metro rail system is still twenty years in the making.  The Metro has become a running joke for most Soteropolitanos (term referring to the inhabitants of Salvador, Bahia).  It has taken so long to complete that the situation is ridiculous.

It is completely understandable why people would be upset given the conditions of the school system, hospitals, amongst other things.  The corruption is nothing new.  Brazilians did not just find out about it and start to get upset.  Most people just complain about the condition of the country but feel powerless to do anything about it.

Maybe things will finally change.  That remains to be seen.

If they want to really push these issues to the forefront they are going to have to do something about the looting and other issues that are spiraling out of control.  The protest is going to have to be organized and focused on a collective goal.  Otherwise the government will wind up lowering the cost of public transportation for one year and build a few new schools and that will be it.

Here is a video that went viral where a Brazilian girl shares her take on the matter (in English):

BRAZIL BOOM DRAWS AMERICANS EAGER TO PROFIT

Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of $35 Martini

Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times

Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Prices for prime office space in Rio became the highest for any city in the Americas this year.

By SIMON ROMERO

Published: August 12, 2011

RIO DE JANEIRO — Pondering the financial storms lashing Europe and the United States, Seth Zalkin, a casually dressed American banker, sipped a demitasse and seemed content with his decision to move here in March with his wife and son.

BRAZIL, CHINA, INDIA TRAVEL INDUSTRY BOOM

Travel industry looks to China, India, Brazil for boom

• 
  

AFP/File – A group of Chinese tourists look for sourvenirs at the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 2009. China, …

by Jim Mannion –  Tue May 17, 4:59 pm ET

LAS VEGAS (AFP) – China, India and Brazil are poised to fuel an explosion in international tourism in the coming years, showering money and jobs on countries ready for it, and trouble for those that aren't, industry leaders say.

With an estimated two billion new middle class consumers expected to come into the markets from those emerging powerhouses over the next two decades, the travel industry sees a potential gold rush ahead.

"The growth of China outbound travel is moving at a huge pace -- it is about 20 percent increase every year. And the number of outbound Chinese travelers hit 58 million last year," said David Scowsill, CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry promotion group.

"And if you look ahead, (with about) 1.6 billion coming out of China and India, they are a huge amount of people coming in with money to burn," he told reporters.

OBAMA: BRAZIL AN EXAMPLE TO THE ARAB WORLD!

A Família de Obama vai chego aqui no Brasil neste fim de semana.  (transl. The Obama Family just arrived in Brazil this weekend.)

“ My mother is gone now, but she would’ve never imagined that her son’s first trip to Brazil would be as President of the United States,” Obama said. “And I never imagined that this country would be even more stunning than it was in the movie.”

President Obama is greatly admired in Brazil and has helped greatly with the image and status of the U.S. after some rough diplomatic years with former President Bush.

Obama: Brazil's democracy an example to Arab world

RIO DE JANEIRO – As U.S. warplanes pounded faraway Libya, President Barack Obama praised Brazil's transition from dictatorship to democracy as a model for the Arab world where decades of stability enforced by strongmen are giving way to an uncertain but potentially brighter future.

CHECK OUT THE PLANS FOR RIO FAVELAS TO GET FACELIFT

Check this out.  Rio de Janeiro has some big plans for their favelas...

Plans for Rio Favelas to Get Facelift

By Patricia Maresch, Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It’s one of Rio’s biggest challenges before the start of the World Cup of 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016: the transformation and urbanization of the city’s favelas (slums) while simultaneously pacifying them with the special UPP police force unit.

Urbanization plan for Penha, photo Divulgação.

The government plans to invest US$600 million remodeling the favelas at the Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha’s Vila Cruzeiro. Last month these two hillsides in Rio’s Zona Norte (North zone) were the scene of some of the worst violent episodes Rio has seen in recent memory.

The army and police now claim to have restored order, and now it’s time for the new phase of remodeling and development. In the wake of the city-wide violence and global media attention, Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes announced the construction of 600 houses, 19 creches, five health clinics, a library, a garden, a cinema and a completely renewed infrastructure for this are of Zona Norte.

It’s all part of a bigger program named PAC 2, Brazil’s Growth Acceleration Program 2. A plan initiated by federal government to build US$800 billion worth of infrastructure between now and 2016 as the second phase of an economic stimulus program whose first phase has yet to be completed.

PAC 2 presentation photo by Ministerio de Educação/Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Apart from remodeling Alemão and Penha, PAC 2 also entails a six kilometer long monorail linking the heart of Tijuca, the Praça Saens Peña, to the favelas Salgueiro, Formiga and Borel. However, overhauling the favelas won’t be exclusive to Zona Norte, Rio plans to have all, almost 600, inner-city favelas redesigned and improved.

Rio’s largest favela, Rocinha in the Zona Sul (South zone) which already benefited from PAC 1, will get a 2.5 km high cable-car which will eventually hook up the favela with the future metro line Barra – Zona Sul. Other favelas that will benefit from the billion dollar project are Mangueira, Cidade de Deus, Batam, Juramento, Rio das Pedras and Favela Kelsons.

Some community leaders wonder if installing cable cars, monorails and swimming pools will be effective, and critics warn that it could all end up in a superficial makeover. The fear is that all plans will result in failure without major investment in education and job creation for residents of the favelas.

During the presentation of PAC 2 earlier this year, President Lula recognized the bureaucratic shackles that are delaying PAC 1 projects. After more than three years, just a little over 50 percent of the scheduled projects have been completed. Last week however, Lula said 82 percent will be finished by the end of this year.

http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/plans-for-rio-favelas-to-get-facelift/

BRAZIL'S RISING STAR - VIA 60 MINUTES CBS NEWS

Brazil's Rising Star

December 12, 2010 5:20 PM

As the U.S. and most of the world's countries limp along after the crippling recession, Brazil is off and running with jobs, industry, and resources. Steve Kroft reports.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/09/60minutes/main7134185.shtml

THE RISE OF THE 3RD WORLD!

The future is now.
Check out this Al Jezeera story titled The Rise of Latin America




Still not convinced???
Search Amazon.com Apparel for Travel Gear and More!

ROUSSEFF, BRAZIL'S PRES-ELECT SPEAKS ON CURRENCY WAR / CHINA INVESTS HEAVILY IN BRAZIL

Rousseff speaks on the currency war

November 2, 2010 5:10pm

by Barney Jopson

 

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president-elect, has made her first comments on the “currency war” since winning Sunday’s election. This is the war in which Brazil’s outgoing finance minister told us the world was engaged and Rousseff, broadly speaking, stuck to the policy line he set out.

In separate television interviews, she said that “manipulating” exchange rates cannot resolve anything, that she would not do anything that “created confusion”, and that international organisations such as the G20 should be strong enough to “force certain countries” to value their currencies realistically.

We can only gather from those words that she does not view as problematic the kind of capital controls introduced - and recently tightened - by the government of her mentor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Continuity is the watchword, but her comments leave plenty of questions unanswered. When she makes her international debut at the G20 meeting in Seoul next week, alongside Lula, she will no doubt deal with some of them.

“RUSH” TO EXIT THE USA?

There is definitely a "feeling" of something is about to happen in the air.  We have met lots of Americans living abroad.  People are jumping ship and expanding their options so to say.  Even President Obama was quoted advising people to widen their perspectives and start thinking globally (not in those exact words).

“Rush” To Exit The United States?

March 18, 2010 by Mark Skousen

“I’ll just tell you this, if this [Obamacare] passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented, I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.” —Rush Limbaugh
Dear supporters of Personal Liberty,

Rush is right. Our personal and financial freedoms are threatened now more than ever, and smart people are seriously looking for the best loopholes to escape ObamaNation, including the possibility of leaving the country.

Intrade, the political futures market, now shows that Obama’s Deathcare legislation, with all its huge tax increases and regulations, has a 59 percent chance of passing. That’s scary.

OCT 31, HALLOWEEN: BRAZIL ELECTS DILMA ROUSSEFF AS PRESIDENT

 Some say she is in position to be the most powerful woman in the world...
Sharif Ali

Brazil Elects Dilma Rousseff as President Posted: 31 Oct 2010 05:36 PM PDT By Sibel Tinar, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Sunday has been the day of victory for Dilma Rousseff, who is elected Brazil’s next president to succeedLuiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after beating her rival José Serra by over ten points in the run-off round of the presidential elections. Dilma Rousseff, who is elected Brazil's first female president this Sunday, cast her vote in Porte Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul before flying to Brasília, photo by Wilson Dias/ABr. After failing to secure the absolute majority of the votes in the first round of elections on October 3rd, which sent the race to the second round, Lula’s protégée Dilma has secured 56 percent of the votes as opposed to Serra’s 44 percent, and will be Brazil’s first female president when she takes office on January 1st, 2011. The elections, in which 99.1 million valid ballots were cast, began at 8AM in the morning, and the vote count started after the last ballots closed at 7PM. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) has called the

BRAZIL'S FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT

Click here for original article

Dilma Rousseff profile: former guerrilla primed to become Brazil's first female president

Dilma Rousseff is a former Marxist guerrilla who was jailed and tortured during the years of Brazil's military dictatorship.

By Robin Yapp, Sao Paulo
Published: 2:03PM GMT 31 Oct 2010

Dilma Rousseff was little known until President Lula selected her as his flavored successor Photo: EPA

Born in December 1947 in Belo Horizonte, in the coffee-growing state of Minas Gerais, Ms Rousseff had a middle-class upbringing.

WORLD BUSINESS NEWS: BILLIONAIRE BUFFET STOCKING UP IN BRAZIL

original story featured here

Is Billionaire Warren Buffett Buying Up Land in Brazil?

Brazilian magazine EXAME reports that America’s favorite investor is headed to Brazil.

According to the report, Warren Buffett, the world’s third richest man, and his famed investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, are interested in buying up land in the Amazon and are negotiating starting an acquisition company in Brazil specifically for this purpose. Apparently Berkshire execs were visiting Brazil about a month ago checking out the area.

If this is true (Buffett’s camp has not confirmed with us yet), Buffett is, as he tends to be, on point. Just this week The Economist featured an excellent report on “the miracle of the Cerrado” saying that the rest of the world should take notes on how Brazil is revolutionizing farming.
Says The Economist:

BRAZIL EXPANDING LINKS IN AFRICA: LULA'S POSITIVE LEGACY

October 12, 2010

Brazil Expanding Links in Africa: Lula’s Positive Legacy

J.Peter Pham, PhD  Entire Article Here

While the results from October 3 presidential election left his former chief of staff and handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, just shy of a first-round victory, forcing an October 31 runoff with second-place finisher José Serra, Brazilian President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva is nonetheless basking in his countrymen’s favor as well as most of the world’s approbation—U.S. President Barack Obama famously dubbed him “the most popular politician on Earth”—as he completes his second four-year term. It did not start that way. The 2002 election of the former trade unionist from the left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, “Workers’ Party”) caused a panic in the financial markets. The Economist last week highlighted the remarkable change:

The markets’ mood could hardly be more different. By way of a pre-election boost, Lula even travelled to São Paulo’s stock exchange to hail a $67 billion share issue by Petrobras, the national oil company, to raise funds to develop Brazil’s vast new deep-sea fields. Brazil’s circumstances and its standing in the world have been transformed during Lula’s presidency and mostly for the better. Poverty has fallen and economic growth has quickened. Brazil is enjoying a virtuous circle: soaring Asian demand for exports from its farms and mines is balanced by a booming domestic market, as—partly thanks to better social policies—some 20 million new consumers have emerged from poverty. No wonder foreign businesses are piling in, while a swelling group of Brazilian multinationals is expanding abroad

BBC NEWS: HOW PRESIDENT LULA CHANGED BRAZIL

View Full Article BBC NEWS

2 October 2010         Last updated at11:53 GMT

How President Lula changed Brazil

By Steve KingstoneBBC News, Sao Paulo

Brazil has seen a huge swell in its middle class since Mr Lula came to power

I used to tell visitors to close their eyes as I drove them into Sao Paulo from the airport.

World Business News: Brazilian Businessman Eike Batista on Charlie Rose

Brazilian Businessman Eike Batista is a billionaire who is on pace to become the richest man in the world. Check out his interview on Charlie Rose and here his interesting outlook on the future of Latin America and Brazil.
find the interview here

or just watch the entire clip below


FreeVideoCoding.com
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World Business News: Sam Zell Talks Brazil on MSNBC

Sam Zell is a one of the most successful real estate investors in the world. Half of his investment portfolio is in Brazil.  I'm not making this stuff up!  Brazil has huge potential.

check this article:

Is Brazil the New United States?

SAO PAULO -- Brazil is the country the whole world loves to love. Brazil is a (joyful) riddle wrapped in an (chaotic) enigma, with the added complexity that the riddle and the enigma are ritualistically juggling with a football, dancing a samba, ogling a sensual mulata, watching a telenovela and sipping a lethal caipirinha -- all at the same time.

The distinctive cultural trace of Brazil is anthropophagy -- from culture to technology, the legacy of a former, lazy European monarchy in a tropical country where the aborigines, after banqueting over the odd whitey, were merrily exterminated while Europeans and black slaves copulated freely, with no Catholic guilt involved (there's no sin below the Equator). If this sounds like the plot of a carnival parade, that's because it is.
De Gaulle once quipped that Brazil "is not a serious country". Multi-ethnic, multicultural Brazilians, addicted to tolerance but most of the time drenched in complacency, preferred to believe -- and joke about -- the eternal promise of "the country of the future" (as novelist Stefan Zweig coined it over 70 years ago).

Now Brazil is on a roll -- and profiting from global goodwill has become a crucial element of Brazil's re-turbocharged soft power. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Brazilian swing. The country is the "B" in Goldman Sachs-coined BRIC -- the new, emerging global powers; less inscrutable and misunderstood than China, less authoritarian than Russia, less shambolic than India (and with no religious problems). And let's face it; much more fun. A new, two-fold national narrative has taken over; Brazil will become "the 5th power" -- that is, the 5th largest global economy (bye bye Britain and France). And the New American Dream is made in Brazil.

Surfing USA, remixed
No wonder Anglo-American elites of the North tend to fry their brains confronted with so much tropical ebullience. At the G-20 in London US President Barack Obama could not contain himself. "I love this guy," he said of Brazil's President Lula, "he's the most popular politician on earth." Time magazine recently named Lula as "the most influential person in the world." The Economist, never a fan of hyperbole, is convinced Brazil will become the 5th power by 2025.

But was the London Independent hyperbolic when it blared, "the world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend"? On Sunday, Dilma Roussef, 63, Lula's former Chief of Staff, may indeed become the next Brazilian President

Brazil Investments: Booming Brazil Is Like the 'US in the 1950s': Sam Zell - CNBC

Brazil Investments: Booming Brazil Is Like the 'US in the 1950s': Sam Zell - CNBC

Booming Brazil Is Like the 'US in the 1950s': Sam Zell

Published: Wednesday, 18 Aug 2010 | 6:16 PM ET 

By: Michelle Lodge
Special to CNBC.com

Brazil is booming and brimming with business opportunities—like the "US in the 1950s”—billionaire businessman Sam Zell told CNBC Wednesday. He said if Brazil continues on the same course, he predicts that the "fiscally conservative" nation will soon be one of the top two countries in terms of growth.

Zell Bets on Brazil Real estate mogul Sam Zell's firm is bullish on the New York market but really sees tremendous opportunity in the growing economy of Brazil, which Zell calls the US in 1950.

“It has a growing population, it’s energy self-sufficient, it’s food self-sufficient," said Zell, chairman of Equity International, about Brazil, the largest of the South American countries. “It’s growing and, at least for now, they’ve solved the problem of inflation.”

Zell also acknowledged that half of his company's investments are in Brazil. 

The native Chicagoan, who made his first fortune buying and selling real estate from distressed owners, ranks 237 on this year’s Forbes list of billionaires.

More recently, he has been dealing with the bankruptcy proceedings following his acquisition of the Tribune Company, whose holdings include the Los Angeles Times, for $8.7 billion in 2007.

Zell said that even though Brazilians will elect a new president in October, both the major candidates have vowed to continue the policies of the current leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who goes by the name Lula.

The real estate tycoon said Brazil has 8 percent debt, compared to 70 percent (of GDP) in the US. The country has a AAA rating from several major credit-rating institutions

Among the opportunities in store for Brazil are hosting the World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016.

Zell said that the market for apartment rentals has come back in that rents have risen to levels charged in 2007, but that the prognosis for commercial real estate isn't as positive. Once the commercial buildings are full again, he added, then rents will be poised to climb.