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 Brazil and China will start conducting business with each other in their own currencies instead of the dollar, a publication quoted Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as saying ahead of his trip to Beijing.
In an interview published Friday in Caijing, a respected Chinese business magazine, Lula said it was important that the two countries "establish a trade that is paid for in our own currencies."
"We don't need dollars." Lula was quoted as saying in the transcript posted on Caijing's Web site. "It's crazy that the dollar is the reference and that you give a single country the power to print that currency."
The Brazilian president has been urging the end of the use of the US dollar in South American trade, saying it will reduce transaction costs for both exporters and importers, especially those operating on a smaller scale.
Brazil and Argentina have already agreed to trade with each other using their own currencies and negotiations for a similar accord with Uruguay are advancing.
In recent years, China and Brazil have been forging stronger ties. In February, Lula met with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping during Xi's visit to Brasilia. Talks yielded an agreement in which Brazil would supply up to 100 million barrels of crude oil a day to China in exchange for a loan of up to 10 billion US dollars.
Lula's trip to China with the 35th anniversary of relations between the two countries. China's Foreign Ministry had commented on the meeting between Lula and President Hu Jintao during Lula's May 18-20 trip:
"They will have an extensive and in-depth exchange of views on deepening bilateral strategic partnership, expanding pragmatic cooperation in various fields as well as regional and international issues of common interest," ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said this week.
In the Caijing interview, Lula da Silva said talks with the Chinese would focus on renewable fuels, the prevention of global protectionism and the ongoing economic crisis. He added he hoped to sign agreements in banking, ports, infrastructure projects and the fight against transnational crime.
Lula was expected to sign a "voluminous" financing agreement for government managed Petrobras. said Energy Minister Edison Lobão.
Lobão did not detail the amount of the loan, but separate reports said that the agenda during Lula's visit includes discussion of a US$ 10 billion US dollars financing package agreed under a memorandum of understanding signed in February by Petrobras and the China Development Bank.
Petrobras Chief Executive Officer Jose Sergio Gabrielli, who was expected to accompany Lula on the journey to China earlier this month, told state media that the corporation would soon finalize the agreement with China to finance sub-salt oil development offshore Brazil.
Petrobras is open to having Chinese state-owned oil companies take equity stakes in oil exploration and production in Brazil as part of a package deal involving the 10 billion in financing, according to a report by Dow Jones Chinese Financial Wire.
Apparently Petrobras is in talks with four Chinese companies about possible equity stakes and also on the volumes of crude oil Brazil would supply as part of a credit-for-oil deal they hope will be ready by early next week, when Lula da Silva visits China.
As part of the Brazil-China outline agreement in February, Petrobras is to sell China Petrochemical Corp. (Sinopec), 60.000-100.000 barrels per day of heavy crude oil as part of the credit deal. Other four Chinese companies could also be involved in the operation, PetroChina Co.'s Chinaoil, Sinopec's Unipec, Sinochem Corp., and Zhuhai Zhenrong.
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. 
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.
for sure they have had several articles in the nytimes stating that a weak dollar could do the states in , especialy if china wants to call in its money from usa treasury bonds. but, nobody is making it a priority. no one is really hammering home the real posibility of what could happen with inflation if they have to keep printing up money....
please tell me im wrong on this one , ch c