Word: boom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before the rubber boom had run its course, Brazil became the world's No. 1 exporter of coffee. Coffee is still the mainstay of the economy, accounting for two-thirds of export income. "Brazil walks on one leg," said a Vargas Finance Minister, "and the leg is coffee." Dependence on a single product makes Brazil vulnerable to exchange crises every time the price slides. Not only is the one leg wobbly: it might some day wither altogether and go the way of dyewood, sugar, gold and rubber. Competition from the other coffee countries and from cheap-labor plantations...
...Vargas regime. Even before Vargas, Brazil had embarked on the slow, painful transition from an agricultural economy based on production for export to a diversified economy based on production for domestic use. The pattern of Brazil's economic past is a series of wonderful one-product export booms, invariably followed by abysmal busts. First came a 16th century boom in a red dyewood called pau-braza (literally, ember wood), which gave Brazil its name. In the 17th century Brazil became for a time the world's greatest exporter of sugar. Then came the gold rush; while it lasted...
White Magic. Brazil's top men are convinced that the way out, the economic road to the wealth and eminence Brazilians envision for their nation, is industrialization. The postwar manufacturing boom is only a beginning. Before industrial growth can proceed much further, as Cafe Filho and his economic advisers see it, the administration will have to slow galloping inflation to a walk. Because of inflation, much of Brazil's short supply of investment capital runs into real-estate speculation, or takes flight into dollar hoards. Too little capital is available for what Cafe Filho's Finance Minister...
Another item cited by the bulls was the fact that 1954's market boom, unlike 1929's, is not built on a tower of credit. Stock buyers must now put up 50% in cash v. only 10% then, with the result that there is now only $1.5 billion of borrowed money in the market v. more than $8 billion in 1929. And despite the buying surge, new money for investment is being accumulated so fast that cash in brokers' accounts totals a record $1 billion v. only some $250 million...
MADAGASCAR URANIUM boom has the Paris stock market soaring. Two companies (Minerals de la Grande He, Fonciere du Sud de Madagascar) are now shipping refined ore to France from deposits discovered in 1952, estimate that production will climb from 15 to 200 tons by next year. On the Paris market, Minerals stock has zoomed from $9 to $122 a share since January...