How Globalism Destroys Jobs, Businesses And Wealth

American Dream
July 14, 2011

As most Americans stand around waiting for the U.S. economy to return to “normal”, there is a never ending parade of jobs, businesses and wealth heading out of the United States.  The jobs and businesses that are leaving are gone for good and will not be coming back.  This is causing unemployment to soar and government debt to skyrocket but our politicians are doing nothing about it.  Instead, politicians from both parties keep insisting that they will solve all of our problems if we will just give them our votes.

Meanwhile, American families continue to fill up their shopping carts with cheap plastic crap made on the other side of the world.  Globalism is slowly destroying the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen and most Americans don’t even realize it.  Today, the U.S. government has surrendered massive amounts of economic sovereignty to global organizations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank.  The United States has also entered into a whole host of very damaging “free trade agreements” such as NAFTA that are costing our economy huge numbers of jobs.  Our politicians always promised us that globalism would bring us to a new level of prosperity, but instead that “giant sucking sound” that you hear is the sound of the U.S. economy being hollowed out.

Our politicians and the talking heads in the mainstream media always seem to be puzzled as to why there seems to be such a lack of jobs in this country.

But it really is no great mystery.

Jeffrey Pfeffer recently wrote an article for Fortune in which he stated the following….

The U.S. seems to be shocked that its economy isn’t creating many jobs, and each monthly report on the unemployment rate and the number of new jobs somehow stimulates more handwringing. I’m not an economist, labor or otherwise, but simple observation suggests one significant contributor to the nation’s job crisis — for a long time, maybe even decades, we have been waging war on jobs and those who hold them.

That is exactly what the policies of the U.S. government have been doing for decades – they have been waging war on jobs.

Both political parties have been eagerly pushing us into a globalized economy.  Both political parties have told us not to worry as thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars have left the country.

Well, so much damage has been done by this point that more Americans than ever are starting to wake up and realize that maybe globalism is not such a great thing after all.

Here is how globalism has destroyed our jobs, our businesses and our national wealth in 10 easy steps….

#1 Globalism has merged the U.S. economy with economies that allow slave labor wages.

The “minimum wage” became a whole lot less meaningful once we merged our economy with the economies of nations where it is legal to pay workers 50 cents an hour.

American workers have enjoyed all of the cheap products that have come flooding into our shores, but our politicians never told them that globalism would also mean that they would soon be directly competing for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that are willing to work for 5 or 10 percent as much.

One big, global labor pool means that the standard of living of the hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the world will come up slightly while the standard of living of American workers will come crashing down at a blinding pace.

Advocates of globalism never can seem to explain how U.S. workers are supposed to compete with teenage workers in Vietnam that often work seven days a week for as little as 6 cents an hour making promotional toys for big corporations.

#2 U.S. companies make bigger profits by sending jobs overseas.

If U.S. corporations can find a place where they can legally pay workers slave labor wages, what do you think they are going to do?

Corporations have a “duty to maximize shareholder wealth” and U.S. government policies actually have the effect of encouraging the offshoring of jobs.

This is even happening in industries that are on the cutting edge of new technology.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, says that our advanced technology companies are creating far more jobs overseas than they are in the United States….

Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.

#3 Globalism has allowed foreign countries to dominate a whole host of industries that used to be dominated by the United States.

U.S. companies are having an incredibly difficult time competing against the low labor costs and the much less stringent business regulations found on the other side of the globe.

In May, the United States spent 50 billion dollars more on goods and services from the rest of the globe than they spent on goods and services from us.

This happens month after month after month.

Every month we get tens of billions of dollars poorer and the rest of the world gets tens of billions of dollars richer.

We are getting clobbered even in industries that we invented.

Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

How did this happen?

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one big reason is that the business environment in the United States has become incredibly toxic.  Businesses in this country face a nightmarish web of rules and regulations and that is a big reason why so many businesses are choosing to leave this country.

In a recent article for Forbes, John Mariotti made a list of just a few of the bureaucracies that U.S. businesses must contend with on a daily basis….

#4 Jobs and manufacturing infrastructure are being lost at an astounding pace and they are not going to come back.

Jobs and manufacturing facilities are leaving this country at a blinding pace.  Nothing is being done to stop this from happening.  These jobs are not coming back and they are not being replaced.

Just consider the following statistics….

*The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

*Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

*The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

*Since 2001, over 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed down.

So what are all of those workers doing today?

There are sitting at home trying to figure out what has happened to the once happy lives that they enjoyed.

Today, there are 6.3 million Americans that have been unemployed for more than 6 months.  That number has risen by more than 3.5 million in just the past two years.

Right now, it takes the average unemployed worker almost 40 weeks to find a new job.  There are not nearly enough jobs for everyone and the competition for the few job openings that are available is brutal.

Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

We have millions upon millions of very hard working Americans that are sitting around hoping that someone will give them a job.

But labor costs about 10 percent as much on the other side of the world so that is where all the jobs are going.

#5 Workers without good jobs can’t buy houses or cars.

A huge factor in the housing crash has been the lack of good jobs.  There are now approximately 10 percent fewer middle class jobs than there were a decade ago.

As competition for jobs increases, wages are being depressed because employers know that they have all the power.

So working class American families are being squeezed like never before.

Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.  A nice home is becoming out of reach for a lot of Americans.

Meanwhile, the cost of food and the cost of gas continue to rise.

One recent survey found that 9 out of 10 U.S. workers do not expect their wages to keep up with soaring food prices and soaring gas prices over the next 12 months.

#6 If American workers don’t have jobs they aren’t paying taxes.

Most Americans have no idea how much our trade deficit contributes to our government debt problems.  When Americans are not working, they are not paying taxes to support our federal, state and local governments.

In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.

That is money that could have gone to U.S. workers and U.S. businesses.  That is money that taxes could have been paid on.

Instead, our workers are sitting at home and our federal, state and local governments are starving for cash.

#7 Instead of receiving taxes, the government must pay out money to our unemployed workers instead.

We are going to support our unemployed workers one way or another.  Either we are going to give them good jobs or we are going to give them welfare payments.

During the recent economic downturn, millions of American workers have been receiving unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks.  It has become soul-crushingly difficult to find a job in America today, and we have developed a whole new class of people that have become totally dependent on the government because they simply cannot find work.

Everywhere you look, government anti-poverty programs are exploding in size.

As 2007 began, there were 26 million Americans on food stamps.  Today, there are more than 44 million Americans on food stamps, which is a new all-time record.

#8 As jobs and businesses leave our shores, many of our once great manufacturing cities have been transformed into hellholes.

In a recent article entitled “American Hellholes“, I talked about the economic decay that we are seeing all over the United States….

All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands.  All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the “rust belt” and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the “real” rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities.  If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about.  Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes.  This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south.  America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.

#9 The United States ends up borrowing back most of the money that it sends overseas every single month.

Every month tens of billions of dollars of our national wealth gets transferred to foreign countries.  In order to make ends meet, our federal, state and local governments end up borrowing gigantic amounts of money from the countries that we have sent our wealth to.

So now we have a national debt that is well over 14 trillion dollars and we owe massive amounts of money to countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

But when we borrow money from other countries that makes us even poorer in the long run.  Debt is never the answer to anything.

#10 Foreign countries are using up some of the wealth that we send them every month to buy up our infrastructure.

Most Americans don’t realize that our state and local governments are selling off our infrastructure piece by piece.  Foreign governments are literally buying pieces of America with the money that we keep sending to them.  In a recent article entitled “Our Politicians Are Selling Off Pieces Of America To Foreign Investors – And Goldman Sachs Is Helping Them Do It“, I talked about this phenomenon….

State and local governments across the country that are drowning in debt and that are desperate for cash are increasingly turning to the “privatization” of public assets as the solution to their problems.  Pieces of infrastructure that taxpayers have already paid for such as highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants are being auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Most of the time what happens is that the state or local government receives a huge lump sum of cash up front for a long-term lease (usually 75 years or longer) and the foreign investors come in and soak as much revenue out of the piece of infrastructure that they possibly can.  The losers in these deals are almost always the taxpayers.  Pieces of America are literally being auctioned off just to help state and local governments minimize their debt problems for a year or two, but the consequences of these deals will be felt for decades.

Sadly, neither political party seems concerned about the effects of globalism at all.

In fact, both parties continue to push for even more globalism.

But large numbers of ordinary Americans are waking up.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, only 36 percent of Americans consider “the increasing interconnection of the global economy” to be a positive thing.  Back in 2001, 60 percent of Americans believed that the globalization of the economy was a positive thing.

So maybe there is a glimmer of hope.

But until fundamental changes are actually made, globalism will continue to destroy our jobs, our businesses and our national wealth.

Is Obama a Marxist or Socialist? None, he works for the Bankers

When it comes to who the president serves, Obama is no different from Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Carter or Reagan

Kurt Nimmo

Glenn Beck, the Fox News talking heads, and no shortage of Tea Party activists like to characterize Barry Obama as a Marxist. In an article gaining a lot of traction across the blogosphere, Wayne Allyn Root, who considers himself a Libertarian Republican, says Obama is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure in order to turn the U.S. into a socialist/Marxist state.

Obamacare, cap-and-trade, legalizing 12 million illegal aliens, increased taxation, and endless bailouts and stimulus boondoggles, Root argues, are schemes designed to overwhelm the system and pave the way for a Marxist takeover of America.

It cannot be denied these schemes will destroy America. It also cannot be denied they are intentional. However, it has nothing to do with Marxism.

Marx advocated a proletarian revolution. He said that in order to overcome the restraint of private property the working class must seize political power through a social revolution and expropriate the capitalist classes around the world and place the productive capacities of society into collective ownership. Marx said the ultimate goal is a a classless and stateless form of communism beneficial to the interests of the proletariat or the working class.

Is it possible the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs operatives in the Obama administration truly desire a communist revolution as Glenn Beck and Wayne Allyn Root insist?

During the 2008 election cycle, Goldman Sachs donated nearly a million bucks to Obama. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase donated nearly $1.5 million to the Obama campaign while Morgan Stanley pitched in over a half million dollars. “When you break it out by individual companies, you find that employees of Goldman Sachs gave more to Obama than workers of any other employer. The Goldman Sachs geniuses are followed by employees of the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard and Google. At many of these workplaces, Obama has a three- or four-to-one fund-raising advantage over McCain,” the New York Times wrote on July 1, 2008.

Is it possible all these folks are clueless about the supposed Marxist philosophy of Obama? Is it possible transnational corporations and international banks savvy enough to game the system for trillions of dollars support a communist system that would ultimately strip them of that wealth?

Goldman along with the Federal Reserve rule the Obama administration. William C. Dudley was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a partner and managing director at Goldman. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, spent 18 years at Goldman. Mark Patterson, chief of staff to Tim Geithner, is a former Goldman lobbyist. Philip Murphy, nominated for ambassador to Germany, is a former Goldman executive. Diana Farrell, deputy director of the National Economic Council, is a former Goldman employee. Emil Michael, White House fellow, used to be an investment banker at Goldman.

Obama functionaries are connected to the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, two organizations established to implement world government. Tim Geithner, Susan Rice, Pete Peterson, Gen. James Jones, Thomas Donilion, Paul Volker, Dennis Blair, Richard Haass, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke and others have connections to the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, the CFR, and Bilderbergers.

“We can be quite sure that somewhere between 400 to 500 high-level members of the Obama administration will be members of the CFR. How can we say that? Because that’s about how many CFR members occupy the current Bush administration (beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney, an in-again, out-again member of the CFR board of directors). And about the same number occupied posts in the Clinton administration,” John F. McManus wrote in November of 2008 after Obama was selected to be the front man for the banksters.

Obama’s mischaracterized socialism is a control mechanism created by the bankers. It has nothing to do with liberating downtrodden workers. The Soviet system was financed by Wall Street, as Rep. Louis T. McFadden, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee throughout the 1920-30s, explained: “The course of Russian history has, indeed, been greatly affected by the operations of international bankers… The Soviet Government has been given United States Treasury funds by the Federal Reserve Board… acting through the Chase Bank.”

The late Antony Sutton’s exhaustive research demonstrates how Wall Street bankers supported and financed the Russian revolution, supported the Soviet Union financially, technologically and military both before and after the Second World War, and also supported Hitler and Nazi Germany financially and military both before and during the Second World War.

The monopoly men who exported jobs from America to slave labor gulags in China and are now in the process of looting the financial system are not dedicated Marxists. The late Gary Allen wrote:

If you wanted to control the nation’s manufacturing, commerce, finance, transportation and natural resources, you would need only to control the apex, the power pinnacle, of an all-powerful socialist government. Then you would have a monopoly and could squeeze out all your competitors. If you wanted a national monopoly, you must control a national socialist government. If you want… a worldwide monopoly, you must control a world socialist government. That is what the game is all about. “Communism” is not a movement of the downtrodden masses but is a movement created, manipulated and used by power-seeking billionaires in order to gain control over the world…. first by establishing socialist governments in the various nations and then consolidating them all through a “Great Merger,” into an all-powerful world, socialist super-state.

The Obama banker-CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg administration is the process of forging this “Great Merger” and is moving inexorably toward an all-powerful world, socialist super-state. Obama’s socialism will not emancipate the workers of America. It will further impoverish and enslave them.

As we approach the mid-term elections, the deceptive claim that Obama is a Marxist will pick up steam and will be exploited by the Tea Party movement as it attempts to get Republicans masquerading as patriots and constitutionalists elected to office.

Glenn Beck and Wayne Allyn Root need to reexamine and stop chanting the ludicrous Obama is a Marxist mantra and point out what Obama really is — a sock puppet reading a teleprompter for his employer: the control freaks at the international banks and multinational corporations.

G20: Banks must hold on to Cash for coming Crisis

The International Crime Syndicate, better known as the G20, determined at its last meeting that the collapse and consolidation of the global economy will begin around 2012 and finish in 2016 with the liquidation of all countries who are in debt with the IMF and the World Bank.

By Luis Miranda
The Real Agenda
June 29, 2010

Bankers and G20 members have direct and indirect ways to speak to the public. At the end of the latest G20 meeting in Toronto, both

From right to left: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama.

groups spoke very clearly about what they have in mind for the foreseeable future. First, they are all in the run to help the process of global consolidation. Second, they will extend the current depression by slowly cutting the available cash for lending. Third, they will continue their austerity programs in a country by country basis to slowly kill their economies and consolidate each nation. Fourth, now that they have robbed the people’s taxes through their rescue packages, they plan to rob shareholders by putting the burden of future rescues on them when the next crisis comes. Fifth, they are disingenuous or irresponsible by thinking that putting aside 130 billion pounds will create any security for the economy, given that only the derivative schemed debt ascends into the quadrillion of dollars. And lastly, they intend to seed and water the final implosion, which according to their communique, can come as soon as 2012.

If all these sounds confusing, please let me explain.

Let’s start by remembering that the G20, and mainly the G8 were the ones who caused the current financial crisis. They did it through their front companies e.g. banks, which implemented a series of corrupt schemes to bankrupt economies and whole countries through investment and betting into risky and sometimes nonexistent financial products e.g. derivatives. These schemes were allowed to exist given the fact that for the past two decades most of the regulations put in place to stop financial fraud were eliminated as an excuse to enable “free markets”. What deregulation effectively permitted was the creation of bogus investing plans which the banks later offered to countries, states and municipalities -often times through governments- and used them to acquire all their infrastructure and cash through the issuance of debt or fraudulent investment.

It has become clear that the G8 and the bankers are not interested in improving current economic conditions. They simply want to extend the crisis as long as they need to, in order to execute their final plan of global implosion. That is what emerges from the idea of cutting lending money and asking banks to hoard the cash for the next crisis, as the G20 communique says. Although 130 billion pounds is peanuts in comparison with the debt most G8 countries hold today, the action of keeping the cash in reserve paints a clear picture of what the ‘leaders’ have in mind. What they want is a slowly and painfully grind down the economies in order to cause the greatest damage. Such policy will assure them the consolidation of more resources before the final blow to the global economy is given.

One of the most important tools the bankers have used along the last 100 years is to create an artificial bubble of money abundance -Fiat money- in order to get the countries and the public to trust them. This is what many describe as economic booms. But given the fact that the global economy is based on debt and fractional reserve banking, the only goal the money bubbles had was to hook up the greatest amount of debt on consumers to then pull the cash off the markets. By doing this, the bankers accelerate their consolidation process. Along with the reduction in lending, G8 nations agreed to continue the austerity plans in each individual country. Austerity will be implanted on the working class by cutting services such as police, hospitals, school funding, and social programs. This will in turn cause civil unrest, which is what the bankers want in order to officially freely unleash their military and technological control grid. A preview of what this grid would look like was seen on the streets of Toronto during the last G20 meeting. It was also seen during Argentina’s collapse in 2001.

The infamous rescue packages glorified by the IMF and the World Bank as the best way to avoid a complete collapse of the global economy -which as explained before was caused by the bankers themselves- were the biggest transfer of money and resources in the history of the world. Only the United States gave the bankers around $25 trillion in tax payer money so Goldman Sachs, Iberia Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and others could pay their shareholders their chunk of the loot. See a complete list of what banks got the cash here. But those $25 trillion were not enough, of course. Germany for example, voted to give 66% of its annual revenue to the banks. Going by the G20′s communique it is clear they are planning another big collapse, possibly the last one. It is also clear they will have to rob someone else this time and that is what the bankers and the ‘leaders’ have said. They will stick the next rescue package to the banks’ shareholders -not to the big ones, though-. So if you have investments in any bank, it is advised to rescue yourself out of it before the new banking package comes along. Shamelessly, they will obligate the banks to hold billions so when the next crisis comes, taxpayers will not be burdened as if we don’t know those billions are the same they stole last 2009. Now that they consolidated and stabilized their fraudulent financial system, it won’t matter if other banks fail, because they are all covered.

The idea that 130 billion pounds is a safety net for a future crisis, or double dip recession as they like to call it, is preposterous. Derivative-produced debt is, depending who you ask, between $600 trillion and $1 quadrillion. According to Robert Chapman, from the theinternationalforecaster.com, buying derivatives is not investing.  It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking.  Derivatives create nothing.” According to the Bank of International Settlements, the derivative bubble has grown exponentially to a point where the amounts negotiated under this scheme has long surpassed the world’s GDP. “Derivative trades have grown exponentially, until now they are larger than the entire global economy.”Credit default swaps (CDS) is the most common form of derivatives. CDS are bets between two parties on whether or not a company will default on its bonds. They are indeed illegal insurance policies, with no requirement to hold any asset. CDS are used to increase profits by gambling on market changes.

The WEB of DEBT in which the current economy was built throughout the past 100 years was the tool used in a process to reverse everything humans achieved. It was not unintended however, as this was the mechanism the globalist bankers planned on using from the beginning. Every time the world experienced a financial crisis like in 1929-1933, the grip of control tightened more and more. The measures to avoid a total collapse, as we were told, were not such. They were simply ways to postpone the imminent collapse.  But the measures the bankers implemented cannot be used forever. Sooner rather than later something will give in. The step by step, ad hoc and non-holistic approach of Fed and Treasury to crisis management has been a failure. . . . [P]lugging and filling one hole at [a] time is useless when the entire system of levies is collapsing in the perfect financial storm of the century. A much more radical, holistic and systemic approach to crisis management is now necessary,” says professor Nouriel Roubini. founder of Roubini Global Economics.

After turning the global economy into a service-based system, where no quality products are manufactured; after driving developing countries into massive debt while collapsing the economies of the western world, the bankers are ready for their last move: a one last crisis. According to the G20 communique, its members must cut their deficits by 2013, a process that already started. This process is supposed to end in 2016, when the nations should have stabilized their deficits. Cutting and then stabilizing deficits means that debtor countries will have to find a way to pay their debts in full to the IMF and World Bank according to the conditions imposed by those entities. Every country that does not pay in full will be liquidated and their resources will be automatically transferred to the globalist bankers. Imagine what happened to Argentina, Greece and Iceland in the last decade, but instead of being those countries, the debtors will be the United States, Spain, Portugal, England and Germany.

Brazil is getting hot. Too hot, too fast

If there is one thing proven beyond doubt during this crisis is that government interventionism in the free market is nefarious.  Developing countries are again and again the victims of globalist inspired management.  Argentina was one notorious case, Iceland and Greece have followed; and now Brazil, a fairly prosperous country in the last decade, is on the way to becoming another victim of artificial implosion.

Financial Times

Brazil’s central bank raised its policy interest rate by three quarters of a percentage point on Wednesday evening in another sign thatBrazil getting too hot the country’s breakneck pace of growth is causing concern over rising prices.

Brazil’s economy expanded by 2.7 per cent in the first quarter over the previous quarter and by 9 per cent over the first quarter of 2009, the national statistics office said on Tuesday. That is much faster than what many economists consider to be the potential, or non-inflationary, rate of about 4.5 to 5 per cent.

“This shows there has been no change in the bank’s position since its previous increase in April,” said Silvio Campos Neto of Banco Schahin in São Paulo. “It is clear from all the indicators that the economy is heating up and inflation is still above target. This is worrying and demands further increases in rates.”

The bank raised its target overnight Selic rate to 10.25 per cent a year, the second three-quarter-point increase at the last two six-weekly meetings of its monetary policy committee.

Consumer price inflation ballooned from a low of 4.17 per cent a year last October to 5.22 per cent in the 12 months to May. Many economists expect inflation to reach 6 per cent by the end of this year, well above the government’s target of 4.5 per cent. Economic growth is expected to be about 6.6 per cent this year.

Mr Campos said he expected the bank to raise the Selic rate to 11.75 per cent by the end of this year.

He said successive interest rate increases would help bring growth back to sustainable levels and predicted the economy would grow by about 4.3 per cent in 2011.

Brazil’s domestic market has recovered quickly from a brief recession during the global crisis, spurred on by a rising consumer class that has benefited from more than a decade of economic stability and low inflation, and from low-cost but effective income transfer programmes.

But the fast pace of growth has exposed bottlenecks such as the poor quality of Brazil’s infrastructure and its heavy tax burden. The rate of investment has risen in recent years but is still short of what is needed to deliver fast, sustainable growth.

Background: Fears of overheating

Brazil’s economy was among the fastest growing in the world during the first quarter, according to figures released on Tuesday that add to fears the economy is overheating and to expectations that the central bank will raise rates again on Wednesday.

The economy grew at a faster-than-expected annual rate of 9 per cent in the three months to March and by 2.7 per cent compared with the previous quarter, according to the IBGE, the national statistics office.

Part of the reason for the growth was an increase in investment, with the rate of investment rising to 18 per cent from 16.3 per cent a year earlier, spurred by gross fixed capital formation, which leapt by 26 per cent year on year, the fastest rate since the IBGE’s current series began in 1995.

“This confirms that the economy is very heated,” said Rafael Bacciotti, economist at Tendências, a consultancy in São Paulo. “The stand-out sectors were industry and services. Employment and wages are also growing strongly and we expect this to continue throughout the year.”

The manufacturing industry grew by 17.2 per cent year on year and the retail sector by 15.2 per cent. Imports also set a record, surging by 39.5 per cent year on year.

The central bank’s most recent weekly survey of market economists showed expectations of overall growth this year rising to 6.6 per cent, the 12th consecutive week of climbing expectations.

But many believe the economy cannot grow at more than 4.5 or 5 per cent a year without provoking an increase in inflation.

The central bank has been forced to act by steadily rising inflation expectations over recent months. Since October, Brazil’s consumer inflation rate has surged from an annual rate of 4.17 per cent to 5.26 per cent in April. However, the central bank’s most recent survey showed a slight drop in forecasts for inflation during 2010, with the average falling to 5.64 per cent from 5.67 per cent a week earlier.

Most economists expect the central bank to announce a second consecutive three-quarter percentage point rise in its policy interest rate, the Selic, at the end of its monetary policy committee’s regular two-day meeting tomorrow.

The committee meets every six weeks to decide whether to change the Selic rate in pursuit of the government’s annual consumer price inflation target, currently 4.5 per cent a year.

If expectations are confirmed, the Selic will rise to 10.25 per cent a year, up from 8.75 per cent when the current tightening cycle began in April.

Business and Technology 101

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