World Cup 2014 (Soccer)

[Crema Americana]

My husband and I would like to go, but we'll see. Probably not. Safety is a concern.

 

[lamarque]

I will go with some friends but of course we will take safety measures like having a t-shirt of some other nation just in case of conflict or getting in the wrong place, specially been Argentines in Brazil for a world cup event i think that troubles will be on the day to day, i think is not a good place to be with a family for that dates.

 

[camberiu]

I know that Brazil is in its ascendancy and pretty soon will leave the BRICS catalogued as a country to have amassed too many billions to be acitively joining much higher scale of and soon to join the G20! But why they have to have the World Soccer and then the Olympics too?

Those are Lula's babies. He is a lunatic megalomaniac of the same species as Cristina. He wanted the Olympics and the World Cup as monuments to his insatiable ego. The mass protests that you saw in Brazil several weeks ago were the public backlash to the public money being spent on the Olympics and World Cup.

From 1992 until 2002, Brazil did everything right. It floated is currency. The size of the government shrank dramatically. Expenses were cut. Markets were deregulated. Capital controls were lifted. State owned companies were sold. The federal budget was balanced. Laws were passed that made city mayors and state governors CRIMINALLY LIABLE if they spent more money than what they had.

The political costs of those reforms were extremely high, but it set the country up for the massive economic expansion that followed.

The Lula won the election.

At first he left everything in auto-pilot. He did not continue the reforms, but he did not revert the previous reforms either. Go the economy continued to grow. The middle class expanded. His popularity sky rocketed and he started to believe that all the good things that were happening to Brazil was because of him. His ego grew even faster the Brazil's GDP. He went after the Olympics and the World Cup as icons to represent Brazil's rise as a world power.

Then the 2008 crises hit, and the country could not fly on the "economic auto-pilot" left by the previous administration anymore. And unlike the previous administration, who had top notch economists on its staff, Lula had surrounded himself with union bosses who knew nothing about economics or how to run a country. So, they turned off the "auto-pilot" and started undoing all the painful economic reforms that had permitted the massive economic expansion of the past 10 years. He started printing money like crazy. The government owned banks (which he had refuse to privatize) were ordered to provide loans to anyone and everyone. Proving to be alive was the only credit check required. A monster real estate bubble rose from this. Businessmen with government connections (like Eike Batista) received heavily subsidized government loans for investments in works of dubious viability, but with great electoral impact.
Lula ordered the construction of a massive shipyard in the northern state of Pernambuco, a region with no industrial tradition on experience. But that was the state in which he was born in, and the political dividends of such an action was enormous. So far the shipyard has suffered MASSIVE financial losses, and all the ships produced there have been late, severely over budget and suffering from serious quality problems. Petrobras has refused to take possession of most ships produced by the shipyard due to quality issues.

Now that China's growth has slowed and capital flows have stopped, it will be interesting to see how the jackasses that are currently running the country will make due.

 

[sleslie23]

Not good news for Brazil:

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/27/crane-collapse-corinthians-brazil-three-killed

 

[ghost]

Not good news for Brazil:

http://www.theguardi...il-three-killed

Yes I saw this in the AM. Stadium number two turns to rubbish. Sorry, you could not even give me tickets to these stadiums.

 

[toongeorges]

It seems that tickets can be bought now. 990$ for the final (high demand obviously).

Was not there also some criticism that airlines charged 10 times the normal price during the World Cup period?

 

[internationalguy]

How much do Christmas trees cost on December 22nd? How much do they cost on the 26th?