Word: brazile
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prizes for guessing why the markets are jumpy. The winner of the first round, with 46.4% of the vote, was Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - universally known as Lula - the candidate of the Workers' Party, which has in the past flirted with repudiating Brazil's massive external debt. Lula, 56, a former labor-union leader running for the presidency for a fourth time, is likely to defeat Jose Serra, the candidate of the governing coalition, in the runoff on Oct.27. Following the economic catastrophes in Argentina and Uruguay, American bankers fear that the commitment of Latin America to the Washington...
...Worth raising a glass to, right? But all last week's election in Brazil got from Wall Street was a Bronx cheer. The Brazilian currency, the real, continued a slide that, apart from a brief rally after an International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue package last August, has gone on all year. In the markets, interest rates on Brazilian bonds (a proxy for the extent to which Wall Street regards investment in Brazil as a risk) are running more than 20 percentage points above comparable U.S. securities...
...Still, Lula's election, should it happen, would be no small matter. Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America; some of the trends that seem likely to propel Lula to power are visible elsewhere on the continent as well. Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, says that Lula's success reflects widespread "unhappiness with the results of economic reform and the quality of leadership." Lula will be nobody's stooge, least of all Washington's. "The U.S. thinks first and foremost of the U.S.," he told Time recently...
...Lula is elected and Washington is wise, the U.S. will accept occasional annoyances with Brazil (Lula will doubtless make nice with Fidel Castro) as a price worth paying for something rather remarkable. It has been 20 years since, in her unwitting gift to Latin America, Margaret Thatcher defeated the Argentine junta in the Falklands war and revealed the bankruptcy of politics run by men in dark glasses and military uniforms. Democracy in Latin America is robust; Hakim calls last week's election "tremendously clean, competent and decent." One mark of health in any democracy is the election of those...
...have Washington and Wall Street evolved enough to celebrate Brazil's triumph of democracy...