Brazil's Incoming Top Economic Adviser Once Said the Federal Reserve is a “Serial Bubble-Maker”

Paulo Guedes 

By Robert Wenzel

I have already discussed the incoming authoritarian Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (see: "Trump of the Tropics" Elected President in Brazil) but it appears his top economic adviser is Chicago school free market in orientation and is worth watching

Paulo Guedes once told a gathering of finance industry elite that the Federal Reserve was a “serial bubble-maker” and Alan Greenspan was “jeopardizing Western civilization,”  reports Bloomberg.

Thinking back on the event years later, Bloomberg informs, he called his comments about Greenspan, who was sitting in the audience at the time, “incisive and objective.”

According to Bloomberg, Bolsonaro, who’s admitted he has only a “superficial understanding” of economics, has said he’s placing full control over the nation’s finances in the hands of Guedes, who was trained at the University of Chicago and founded both a private equity firm and a think tank for liberal economic theories.

Guedes' conversion to free market advocacy took place as a result of his time spent at U of C. Bloomberg again:

Guedes wasn’t always a free-market champion. He considered John Maynard Keynes his hero when he left Brazil for Chicago. There, he studied under economic thinkers redefining the field, like Milton Friedman. He converted to liberalism and returned to Brazil to proselytize.

But it should be remembered that the U of C Chicago school economics isn't the Austrian school and that the Chicago school, though free market leaning, produces all too many government technocrats.

Will Guedes adopt the sound free market teachings of the Chicago school or the horrific technocratic perspective that often comes out of U of C?  Calling the Fed a “serial bubble-maker” is a good start but will he want to run  Friedman's formulaistic money printing plan in Brazil or will he heroically halt all money printing?.

We are about to find out.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of

EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. 

More about Wenzel here.