Most of the migration into Brazil, or China for that matter, is due to fact US unemployment is high (near 20% if all who have stopped looking for job in US or are very under employed part timers etc. are considered) and these countries have labor shortages if you have either good education or a commercial skill.
I dont´t have data on China, but migration into Brazil from US has doubled in the last three years.
That's great and all, but Brazil and China remain countries that people move
out of, while the USA remains a country that people move
in to. Last year, over 60,000 Chinese gained permanent residence status in the USA, as did over 12,000 Brazilians. How many Americans moved to those countries last year?
Wealth, at least the sense of it, is very relative. For example, wife´s working daughter with only two children has three maids, one a live in. She is "upper middle class" almost everyone in the middle class has a maid.
That's one of the upshots in living in a country with lots of destitute people who will work for peanuts.
There are downsides, though. Like how one in ten adults in Brazil is illiterate. Or how your average American lives to be ten percent older than your average Brazilian. Or how a baby born in Brazil is 4 times as likely to die before reaching age one than a baby born in the USA. Or how your average Brazilian is five times as likely to be the victim of a murder than is your average American.
I don´t know how PPP is calculated
And yet here you sit, charged with the duty to moderate a forum on business and economics. You should probably learn. We've been having discussions about PPP for, literally, many years now. And you frequently invoke PPP yourself when you want to advertize the size of China's economy. Here's a hint: it's based around comparing the cost of a generic "basket of goods."
- does it, for example claim Brazilians own less cars because they tend to be smaller and with less luxury features (for example if you want a radio, you add it - not standard, but most do have one.) Homes do not have heating in Sao Paulo - no fuel expenses. (After sunset, perhaps 15 times a year, I put a sweater on.)
There are different methodologies for PPP, some of which attempt to take into account differences in the quality of the goods purchased. None of them are nearly big enough effects to close the giant gap between the per-capita GDP in the USA and that in Brazil. The fact that Brazilians expect a much lower level of amenities in their cars is a salient demonstration of the fact that the overall quality of life there is lower than the USA, BTW.
Also, plenty of places in the USA don't need any heating (I never use it, myself), and plenty more never need air conditioning (unlike Brazil).
It is a different life style in Brazil, more relaxed (could say more humane) - at least twice as many holidays as in the US, essentially free medical care, etc. I would guess the average Brazilian, middle class, spends at least four weekends and one week at the beach annually.
And for all that free medical care, Brazil has much worse infant mortality, life expectancy, etc.
Does PPP take these factors into consideration.
PPP is a measure of purchasing power, not quality of life.
Money is not everything and the only thing that makes for a good life.
Okay, then, how about you address all of the various other measures of quality of life that I provided, which show that the USA is clearly way ahead and that you made a point of ignoring in your response here?
I will turn the question around: When will the US adequately regulate the financial system, (banks & stock market) instead of have huge loses to the investing public via out right fraud or millions in funds that no one knows where they went or about 100 banks each year failing, including big ones like Lehman Brothers that shake the world into recession?
That's not "turning the question around." That's "changing the subject entirely."
If you "turned the question around," you'd be asking why the US blames others for the financial crisis and recession, and I'd be responding that we don't.
In last five or more years, one small bank in Brazil came close to going under, but was privately taken over / merged into/ a big one - no one lost money, not even the investors in the smaller bank. Financial wrong doing is very rare in Brazil - as that is an almost certain ticket to long years in a not very nice jails. (Brazil´s major crooks are mainly in elected offices and there is certainly no shortage of them there.) We don´t have Madoffs, Coubins, etc that screw their investors out of 100s of millions of dollars. Nor Morgan Standly`s "whale" speculator that cost their stock holders 5 billion dollars! We don´t even have the strange "financial derivatives" he used to do that with. We have well regulated stock market and banks. Someday, I hope, the US will too.
That's great that Brazil has a stable financial system. I still prefer to live in the USA, all things considered.
howvever, US should recognize that by setting interest rates so low many other countires are hurt
"Hurt" here means that they don't get to export as much to the USA, and may attract carry trade flows if they have high interest rate regimes?
Does the ability to import more stuff from the US for the same cost also somehow count as "hurt?" Or is there, perhaps, some offsetting advantages to other countries as well?
- forced to take measures to protect them selves,
I don't see anyone in the USA expecting that any other country won't respond as is appropriate to their situation, nor complaining that Brazil has decided to lower its (very high) interest rates to prop up growth there. The complaints all come from the Brazilian side, and they are drummed up populism that the Brazilian elite uses to deflect criticism of policy moves that they want to undertake for reasons of their own.
Which is fine and all, everybody needs a good bogey-man. But ostensibly informed commentators who claim a bilateral perspective ought to do better than to get caught up in that. This stuff is for internal consumption, so you aren't actually doing Brazil any favors by trying to advertize it to Americans and stir up conflict on that basis.
which in the not too distant "long run" will (and is in process of doing) will destroy the dollar´special status.
The dollar's special status is based on the stability and size of the US economy, and not particularly on the real yields available on US Treasury Securities in any given year.
For example, China & Japan (#2 & #3 global economies) no longer will use the dollar for mutual trading. India & China agree to that last year. All the Brics (S. Africa included) have dropped the dollar for their mutual trade. China and about 18 Asian Nations it trades with, no longer use the dollar. China is now the dominate trader with Africa and the RMB is increasing used there.
So what? Dollar holdings for settling of trade are a minor sideshow. The dollar's 'special status' is its status as a reserve currency. That countries buy a few extra dollars because it makes a convenient standard for denominating trade is just that.
As they say (and it applies to the US´s currency war, even if US depressed interest rates were for self stimulation, and not intentional war): "What goes around, comes around"
Again, this is Brazil's currency war, and nobody outside of Brazil thinks it's otherwise. And of course the USA is looking for internal demand stimulation - we've been a consumption-led economy for a long time now, and our internal demand is a much larger piece of the pie than export demand. You really think the USA is pursuing some China-style mercantilist approach or something?
What will "come around" is an eventual uptick in inflation. Since inflation is currently low, and unemployment is high, that is the right move for us. Brazil can handle its own affairs, or not; it isn't going to make or break the USA either way.
When the dollar is no longer of much significance for settling global trade, then US will understand it should not have ignored the external effects of its extremely low interest rate policy
The question of dollar-denominated trade is, again, a sideshow, and anyway is not particularly influenced by returns on Treasury Securities. You seem to have this confused with dollar reserve holdings.
Regardless, though - those interest rates are actually set in free-market auctions. The USA can only get away with issuing debt at that low rate
because there is adequate demand for those dollars in the global market. If people/countries/institutions were systematically ditching their holdings, demand for dollars would be down and interest rates would be exploding as a consequence. This is manifestly not occurring. Whatever weaknesses the US dollar has, it still seems to be a safer bet than most of the alternatives, and so the demand is there.
