Dear Sir,

Much as I enjoyed Rebecca Ray’s article “Follow the Money to Latin America” (although I don’t share her enthusiasm), I must say that we should get the numbers straight. Quoting an external source, Rebecca says:

“With a population of more than 500 million and 125 million households with a combined buying power of USD 1.16 trillion (trillion, not billion), compared to USD 428 billion for the 10.7 million households in the United States…”

I must say first that the sentence is a little bit confusing, with so many billions, trillions and millions, specially taking into account that “bilion” and “trillion” have different meanings in different countries. The problem is really with the numbers. The sentence seems to imply that there is a lot of money to be spent by the people in Latin America (“trillion, not billion”) but if we look at Rebecca’s figures, we will see that this is not really the case:

• 125,000,000 households in Latin America have USD 1,160,000,000,000 to spend. That is USD 9,280 per household.
• 10,700,000 households in USA have USD 428,000,000,000 USD to spend. That is USD 40,000 USD per household.

I may have my numbers wrong but leaving aside the fact that we don’t know if these “buying power” ammounts are monthly, yearly or something else, from Rebecca”s figures, it is difficultto understand how this buying power is going to be realized any time soon.

But then, I think that Rebecca's figures are not totally right:

Latin America

• Latin American population: 500,000,000
• Latin American households: 125,000,000
• Number of persons per household: 4

USA

• USA Population (from US Census): 292,430,463
• USA Households: 10,700,000
• Number of persons per household: 27 (!)

If the number of USA households is actually higher than 10.7 million, then Rebecca’s argument would be stronger, but if this figure is wrong, how can we be sure that the other figures are reliable? And of course, if the figures are not reliable, the whole article may be questioned…

Best,
 
Daniel García Magariños
Linguistic Services Division Terminologist, Language Technologist
European Central Bank

Ms. Ray responds:
 

The confusion stems from the fact that the figure of 10,700,000 households in the U.S. applies only to Hispanic households in the U.S. Mr. Cárdenas has confirmed the figures and states the following:

The numbers I have are correct. I was using the figures from the perspective of total U.S. Hispanics living in the Northern United States. The total household income for the U.S. is quite a bit higher. I got the figure from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Strategy Research Corporation.

With regards to the issue of billions vs. trillions, Mr. García’s point is well taken. We will keep this in mind in the future so that we don’t confuse and/or mislead our readers.