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 The Brazilian Central Bank (BC) reduced its benchmark SELIC interest rate a full point to 12.75% on Wednesday, January 21, its biggest cut since December 2003.
Policy makers slashed the Selic rate by 1 percentage point to its lowest level since March 2007, when Brazil was still enjoying a boom that ended abruptly with the global economic crisis late last year.
Economists surveyed by the bank predicted that it will continue cutting the Selic throughout the year, bringing it to 11.25% by 2010 to revive rapidly slowing growth.
Latin America's largest economy was expected to expand 4% or more in 2009. But economists surveyed by the bank now forecast 2.5% growth for the year, while some analysts predict an even greater slowdown as the world economic crisis stalls demand for the commodity exports on which Brazil relies.
Union members, who protested by the thousands on São Paulo's streets ahead of the bank's decision Wednesday, criticized the move as too conservative. Labor leaders were asking a 2 percentage point rate cut to spur lending and production and slow layoffs.
"A reduction of 1 percent isn't much," said Artur Henri, head of the Central Workers Congress.
One of the nation's top big business lobbies, the National Confederation of Industry, called the cut "rational and pragmatic," the Agência Estado news service reported.
Brazil lost 654,000 jobs in December, more than any month since May 1999, the government admitted this week. Unemployment reached 7.6% in November, and December's jobless rate is due to be announced later this week.
The Central bank's monetary policy committee had resisted cutting rates as inflation persisted despite Brazil's slowing growth and given the country's long tradition with spiraling prices. But recent data shows price gains have eased, with inflation now predicted to dip to 4.9% in 2009, according to economists surveyed by the bank.
Five of the committee's eight members voted for Wednesday's 1 percentage point cut, while three favored a reduction of 0.75 percentage points, the bank said in a release.
Mercopress
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Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
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.
It will be interesting to find out the change in unemployment rate later this week !
Either quite a big difference... or MANIPULATED to smooth and hide the disaster.
Eventually....a change in methodology ! smiles
My Tentative shoot is that your unemployment rate should jump from 7,6 % in September to around 10,2 %...in ONE month, since Sept. unemployed stats were at 1,8 millions ! Sorry dont find Oct/Nov number of unemployed people.
Or an increase of around 33 % !
Ouchhhh...it hurts ! Time will tell !