Ben Chu: Brazil's failure to live up to its great economic promise has handed power to the far right

By Dilip -
There are few things more depressing than the sight of financial traders perking up in response to the electoral success of racist, misogynist, homophobic, pro-torture authoritarians. Brazilian markets have been the latest to follow this dismal pattern. When it became clear earlier this month that Jair Bolsonaro was likely to win the presidential election in Brazil the stock market got a jolt and the currency went higher. Those indicators are expected to extend their gains today on confirmation of Bolsonaro’s final victory in Sunday’s runoff over Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party.

Yet surely we have learned over the past decade that markets are not infallible. Could traders’ response to Bolsonaro’s success not just be immoral, but actually misguided in its own narrow terms?
Bolsonaro promises control of public finances and inflation, a programme of mass privatisations, tax cuts for individuals and companies, and public pension reforms. The combination of authoritarianism and free market economics is reminiscent of Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s. Bolsonaro even has a Chicago University-trained economic guru, drawing comparisons with Pinochet’s Milton Friedman-schooled “Chicago boys”.

Brazil has unquestionably fallen into economic crisis in recent years. It is only now limping out of the worst recession in the country’s history. The unemployment rate is 12 per cent – double that of five years ago. The poverty rate has jumped from 20 per cent to 25 per cent over that time... read more:

See also
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll
It is curious that the man who wrote a book, Capitalism and Freedom, to drive home the argument that only classical economic liberalism can support political democracy can now so easily disentangle economics from politics when the economic theories he advocates coincide with an absolute restriction of every type of democratic freedom
Milton Friedman did not save Chile: Naomi Klein
George Monbiot - Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

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