This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 11th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The populist governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela have all been stung by the reality

of a world following a commodities boom.

Ian Vasquez, the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity comments on the big recent

changes in Latin America. Well winds of change are definitely blowing in

in Latin America and I think that people are finally being able to express through the political system how

unhappy they are with populist politics in Brazil and Argentina and in Venezuela, some of which has been a surprise.

Brazil has been considered for many years sort of the moderate country.

It's not a totally full-fledged populist country, but it was not too long ago, only a few years ago, the people

were praising it as Bain the country that has finally arrived, that has had high growth rates that was mixing some orthodox

macroeconomic policies with enlightened social policy of a lot of social

spending to benefit the poor etc under this left

of center government.

I think that there was a lot of irrational exuberance about Brazil then and now it's

turning out to be the case. It just so happens that the past several years now

have seen very low growth. This year is going to have negative 3% growth in Brazil.

Basically, with the end of the commodity boom that was able to sustain bad policies for a long time, all the

populist countries are coming under severe strain, whereas the countries that are more economically

free, the relatively free countries like Chile, like Peru, like Panama,

are going to sail through this and they're going to weather this storm with positive growth rates

and so on. And the region is seeing the difference in Brazil.

...