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 Brazil was forced to appeal to 22.9 billion US dollars in the past month, including sales of foreign reserves, derivatives and loans to prop the weakened Real punished by investors fleeing from emerging markets to more secure assets.
More over sales of reserves to buy the Brazilian currency in the spot market totaled 3.2 billion US dollars from October 8 to October 20, Central Bank President Henrique Meirelles said in testimony before congress. The other types of intervention, including loans and currency swaps, don't affect the level of reserves.
"Even smaller economies, like Mexico, have spent more than us," Meirelles said in Brasilia. Mexico's central bank bought 6.4 billion worth of pesos on October 10 alone to shore up the currency.
The Real has lost a third of its value against the US dollar since reaching a nine-year high August first, causing some of the biggest companies to report more than 5 billion reais (2.2 billion USD) of losses from bad currency bets. The Bovespa stock market index has fallen 32% in the period.
So far this month the Brazilian currency has dropped 20%, the third-worst performer among the 16 most-actively traded currencies, trailing only the South African rand and Mexican peso.
In a decree published Wednesday, October 22, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva authorized the Central Bank to engage in currency swap transactions with foreign central banks. Brazil's international reserves stood before the crisis at US$ 200 billion.
In addition to foreign-exchange interventions, the Brazilian central bank has taken measures to inject more than US$ 71 billion in the banking system to ease a credit crunch that's hurting small and medium-size lenders.
Meirelles told Congress that bank lending fell 13% in the first eight business days of October from the same period the previous month.
However Latin America's largest economy is "performing well" amid the "severe" global credit crisis, Meirelles said. The government's debt as percentage of GDP has fallen because the country is a net dollar creditor, he said. Capital levels at Brazilian banks exceed the minimum amount required under the Basel guidelines, he added.
Meantime, Brazil's Finance Minister Guido Mantega also addressing congress said that economic growth in 2009 should slow to between 4 and 4.5% from an estimated 5% this year.
"Brazil's economy is more dynamic and has several comparative advantages over advanced economies," Mantega said. "The sole fact that only 13% of our GDP comes from exports is an advantage, we depend more on domestic demand than foreign markets, so we'll be less affected than China in case there's a reduction in global trade."
Mercopress
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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. 
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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. 
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Or has the bottom not yet been found? Confidence in the Real was one of the legs of the three-legged stool FHC's team came up with to end hyper-inflation and stabilize and modernize the economy. That confidence was like Good Will in valuating a company, an asset even though somewhat intangible. Once lost, can you get it back? Three billion has left Brazil already this month, pulled out by foreign investors.