Did Bloomberg recently acquire The Onion and fail to announce it? Well, you have to read its lead paragraph about Brazil’s latest outlook twice to be sure:
Analysts reduced to 0.55 percent their GDP estimate for 2015 from 0.69 percent the previous week, according to the Dec. 19 central bank survey of about 100 analysts published today.
Apparently that’s a tradable data bite for some algo, somewhere. But its also a cogent demonstration that central bank driven financialization has generated mind-blowing pockets of wasteful stupidity everywhere. Could there really be 100 economists updating there GDP forecast every week to the second decimal point for Brazil alone?
In the real world, Brazil is a financially unstable, debt-bloated, politically corrupt, speculation-riven satellite of the China house of cards. Accordingly, the 14 bps of GDP forecast change highlighted above is about as pure an expression of content-free noise as can be found in the financial media. It cannot possibly be of any use except to robo-traders with holding periods of a few seconds – or even hours or days for that matter.
If someone were to actually ‘invest’ in Brazilian securities, by contrast, it might be better to know that nearly every single macro indicator is heading south at an accelerating pace; that over the last 10 years the Brazilian economy has been bloated and distorted by the double whammy of unsustainable demand for raw materials from China and rampant internal malinvestment and speculative bubbles funded by its socialist government and the latter’s central bank hand-maiden; and that the Brazilian household sector went on a borrowing spree that made the US mortgage bubble look tame.
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on December 23, 2014.
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