Cristina Takes on Financial Times in Multi-Platform BRICS Tirade
Cristina has been on the media warpath against a perceived attack on emerging markets.
This Monday, Cronista republished (in Spanish) an article from the Financial Times titled, “Emerging Markets: Fixing a Broken Model.” The article is long, a bit on the dry side, hardly sensational and difficult to construe as an attack on anyone.
The article does not mention Argentina even one time. Nevertheless, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner exploded onto the Twittersphere with close to 100 tweets, shot back with twoblog posts and drove her point home at an electoral rally where she somehow connected the BRIC issue with European nations turning away migrants.
I have to preface this by saying that a few years ago, I liked Cristina enough. I disagreed with her, but at least could respond to her policy moves and statements as a professional with reasoning based in economics. In this case, her violently emotional reaction to a newspaper article reads like a crazy person writing a stream of consciousness. You disagree with Cristina or want to suggest she has misread an article? Too bad! You’re a racist who hates the poor and celebrates genocide.
Before attempting to decipher why an economic assessment of emerging market growth happens to grind Cristina’s gears, it’s important to have a bit of context concerning emerging markets and the terms BRIC and BRICS.
BRIC is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China that was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs investment bank paper to describe these big, rapidly growing countries. Over the ’00s, BRICs was used to describe the shift in global economic power away from the historically rich economies to the developing world. Back then, economists debated projections of the future power of the BRIC economies, with estimates ranging from overtaking the G7 economies by the middle of the 2020s to the 2050s.
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