Finance, Forex and Investments

Emerging countries or next slaves?

Each decade some financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and others make predictions about what countries will be the new promising markets, etc. In the 70's there was this belief about Brazil, Argentina and Israel. The first two became the world's largest external debts thereafter, and Israel didn't take off (maybe for political reasons or maybe too tiny to be a world leader). In the 80' people were almost sure Japan would be the next world leader, and it simply didn't happen. In the 90's they made a comparison between the American and Chinese economies using purchasing power parity and not nominal exchange rates between the dollar and the Chinese currency. OK, this time they were right (at least partially). At the same time the EU was supposed to be the next world leader, and the Euro the next world reserve currency, and see what happened. Now there's this hullabaloo about the BRICS. Based on country sizes and population, people believe those countries have all that it takes to play a significant role in the world's economy, GDP and even political influence. But would this be another mistake? Most of those countries lack the minimum infrastructure, suffer from huge social disparity, poverty, bad education, political equilibrium, democratic principles, etc. Would this be another shot at expanding the domains of the true power/money holders (in the classic western economies) beyond their country borders, harnessing the lower cost laborforce in the BRICS, thus enhancing their assets, or is this idea just another conspiracy fallacy? In other words, I think we can already believe that China is on its own, but will Brazil, India and Russia, to name the three, develop better social and economic standards, or will they just be slaves working for their masters in Wall Street, London, the Central Bank in Frankfurt etc? What do you think? Dear Mr Lucio - it's against the community's rules to call people names. If I'm asking it's because I don't know, and I have all the right not to. I've already reported you.

Public Comments

1. My God! You misunderstood the whole BRIC thing. The BRIC's main aspect is just one: New players with absolute huge GDPS. You can't say that the 2nd, 7th, 9th and 11th economies of the world are not important, because they are. And they ALREADY are. It's not about social standards, better healthcare, democratic principles, it's just the GDPS stupid!