Word: lula
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...will his social agenda, particularly alleviating the burden of an unemployment rate that hovers close to 20 percent. Spiraling unemployment has been the downside of the free-market policies implemented by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and has swung voters more solidly behind the PT. It's an issue that Lula, a self-taught blue collar worker and trade unionist before becoming the beacon of the Brazilian Left, understands better than any of the other candidates - and certainly better than most international investors. "If international economists were always right, all we would need is to hire 10 Nobel Prize (winners...
...Still, international investors are skittish about the possibility that a Lula victory may result in a default on the country's foreign debt obligations. The PT candidate had, in fact, called for such a default in his early years on the campaign trail in the late 1980s, but since then has, like many erstwhile socialists from the developing world, accepted the basic ground rules of the international financial system. Still, investor anxiety has sent Brazil's currency, the Real, into its sharpest decline since it was allowed to float freely against the dollar...
...Lula quite the bogeyman that he seems to be in the minds of Wall Street? And would he, as president, challenge the IMF, reverse free market reforms, and cut ties with the international investing community...
...answer is also "no", because Lula knows that economic autarchy is not an option for the export-driven economic powerhouse. The recent $30 billion stand-by credit approved by the IMF on September 6 - the largest ever granted to any country - is scheduled to be released in stages, the bulk of it delivered in 2003 only if Brazil complies with the "relevant criteria" established by the Fund. And that's a strong inducement for Lula to not stray too far from the IMF's program...
...Lula would not have "made it to where he is if he were a retard, as so many still try to portray him," writes Nahum Sirotsky, a veteran Brazilian journalist and former aide to Brazilian ambassadors in the United States and Israel. Which is a way of saying that the PT man understands the reality of international capital flows. Any domestic program that results in a default or an onerous restructuring of the debt will put him in an extremely difficult position to pursue the progressive policies on which he has campaigned...