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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex who wrote (16531)	8/25/1998 8:25:00 AM
From: Gabriela Neri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116762

Alex, Brazil is the only country that really counts on the continent, with Argentina a very distant second. Venezuela is but a thermometer for the real deal, Brazil. Venezuela is also more of a country whose significance, from the point of view of the US, is more strategic than purely economic. We import more oil from Venezuela than any other country. The US, when push comes to shove, cares only about that major fact in regard to Venezuela. A devaluation in Venezuela is a fait accompli to anybody familiar with the situation there. It was obvious that it absolutely had to happen a long ago as March 1998. However, Brazil is the real deal. It is a real country with a diversified and industrialized economy. It has highly developed manufacturing in aircraft, autos, and high tech, in addition to many services, etc. In other words, even though it is still heavy into natural resources, it has many value added economic sectors outside of extraction industries and is important to the world economy, not to mention its crucial importance to the South American continent, in particular the Souther Cone, which is where most of the economic acivity is concentrated(outside of cocaine and banana and mango picking). It is a rich, robust country with tremendous opportunity for growth and wealth creation with a creative ,vibrant, and wealthy private sector and real political leadership. This is not the case with, for instance, Venezuela, who relies on extracting out of the ground what the good lord was kind enough to bequeath to them, as their only real contribution to the world economy. They are not even well organized enough to divert their oil profits into other, less cyclical and diversifying industrial or economic activities. Venezuela is irrelevant, really, in the scheme of things, as long as our(US) oil supplies are not threatened in any way. But, if Brazil gets clobbered, it is a sad day indeed, with real economic and psychological significance.