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 Dragged down by the bearish behavior of international markets and fears of a global recession, the Brazilian stock market tumbled over 10% this Wednesday, October 22. Losses intensified at the end of the trading session reflecting the losses of the Dow Jones in Wall Street.
For the sixth time in the last three weeks, the Bovespa, São Paulo's Stock Exchange, stopped operation for half an hour, after the automatic circuit breaker was activated, something that happens when the Ibovespa, Bovespa's index, declines by 10%.
One of the reasons for the pessimistic scenario was a statement by the British premier. Gordon Brown, admitting that the United Kingdom wouldn't be spared the recession.
Bovespa's bad day was due in part to shares tied to commodities and banks. Oil multinational Petrobras' stocks, for example, dropped 9.59%, while mining company Vale saw its shares plummeting 7.8%.
Bad news didn't come only from overseas, however. The publication in the federal newspaper Daily Gazette (Diário Oficial) of temporary measure 443 led the market to fear interference of the state in the banking system.
The presidential measure opens the doors for the Banco do Brasil and Caixa Econômica Federal, two state-owned financial institutions, to buy directly or through their subsidiaries, banks headquartered in Brazil. This would allow the government to take over banks in financial trouble.
Brazilian Finance minister, Guido Mantega, made it clear that people shouldn't read too much into the new temporary measure, denying that any bank in Brazil is on the verge of collapse. In his press conference, Mantega tried to calm the market. "There is no bank breaking in this country," he said.
Despite the minister's assurances, however, Banco do Brasil's shares lost 15.4%, falling to 13.88 reais, while another bank, Unibanco, saw its stocks declining 13.7% to 12.72 reais. Two companies from the building sector also stumbled badly: Gafisa dropped 17,2%, to 15.12 reais and Cyrela slipped 16.1%, to 10.40 reais.
At the end of the day, on Wednesday, the Ibovespa had fallen a healthy 10.18% to sobering 35,069 points, the lowest in over two years. With yesterday's collapse, the Brazilian market has now declined over 45% since the beginning of 2008. The Ibovespa had finished 2007 at 63,886 points.
Meanwhile the dollar started to zoom up again. Ignoring measures from the Brazilian Central Bank to contain the greenback, the American currency went up 6.67%, closing at 2.38 reais.
Early afternoon, the Central bank sold US$ 216.1 million in swap exchange contracts with periodic adjustment. Another US$ 299.5 million were sold later in the day.
According to the Central Bank president, Henrique Meirelles, Brazil has already used US$ 22.8 billion to contain the dollar since the aggravation of the recent crisis in mid September when the American bank Lehman Brothers folded.
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What a joke! 
So this is what you get. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
Are you there, concerning the "healthy" real estate companies in.....BRAZIL...you stated a week or so ago ?
Just read a chart if you can ! But please...please....not upside down...if you can do so !!!!!