Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, lent his support to Brazilian policy makers' efforts to weaken the Real, saying it needs to decline 20% to keep Latin America's biggest economy competitive.
The Brazilian economy last year registered its second-worst performance since 2003 as higher borrowing costs and a currency that rallied to a 12-year high led it to under-perform emerging-market peers China and India.
Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff will be meeting her US peer Barack Obma next March when she is also scheduled to hold talks with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and attend a BRIC group summit.
Ten years ago this week, Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, coined the term BRIC, elevating the profile of four countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, that he thought were poised to become “growth economies.”
The Latin American block arrives this week at the G20 summit in Cannes with a consensus spearheaded by the strong political standing of Brazil in global affairs and with criticisms to the way in which the European Union and the US are managing their respective “crises”.
Major trading nations led by Argentina, Brazil and Russia are raising barriers to international and threatening the global economic recovery, the European Union's executive arm said on Wednesday.
The International Monetary Fund hopes investments in European bonds by the fast-growing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies are not limited to less risky government bonds such as German or British bonds, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said in an Italian daily on Wednesday.
The Secretary-General of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), Colombian María Emma Mejía said that the region has shown “more imagination and audacity in the measures applied” than G7 countries, which are debating how to get out of the mess they are currently undergoing.
German automaker BMW said this week it would probably build its first assembly plant in Brazil after strong demand for luxury cars generated stellar earnings for the global leader.
Hyundai Motor Company, South Korea’s largest automaker is constructing its seventh overseas plant in Piracicaba, Sao Paulo state, Brazil to actively respond to soaring demand in one of the world’s fastest growing markets and to bring its manufacturing presence in so-called BRIC countries full circle.