POLITICS

President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Brazil this week vindicates Iran’s strategy of cosying up with Latin America. Read the full story in The Economist

Brazil’s share of those in poverty fell by half from 17% to 8%, an annual reduction of 3.2%. Read how it compares with China and India in The Economist.

ECONOMY

Brazil’s economy will grow 6.1 percent in 2010, bolstered by rising domestic demand, increasing exports and higher investment, according to Banco BradescoSA, the country’s second-largest bank by market value (Bloomberg).

INVESTMENT

Brazil’s Gerdau, the world’s second-largest maker of long steel, will focus growth in Brazil where investment in infrastructure is surging, the company’s chief executive told newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo (Reuters).

Volkswagen, Europe’s largest carmaker, plans to invest up to 6.2 billion reais ($3.5 billion) in Brazil from 2010 through 2014 as it aims to become the country’s biggest carmaker, the company’s Brazilian head said (Reuters).

Iron ore miner Vale said it planned to invest in another steel mill — this time in Para, the northern Brazilian state where its main Carajas iron ore mine is (Reuters).

Votorantim Participacoes SA, a closely held Brazilian producer of materials from aluminum to cement, plans to invest 4.5 billion reais ($2.6 billion) next year, a local newspaper reported, citing the company’s General Director (Bloomberg).

BANKING

State-owned Brazilian bank Caixa Economica Federal plans to announce the purchase of a stake in at least one more bank besides Banco Panamericano by year-end, newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported (Reuters).

Banco do Brasil, Latin America’s largest bank by assets, may seek acquisitions in the United States, looking to benefit from “devalued” prices among regional lenders, Chief Executive Aldemir Bendine said (Reuters).

Banco do Brasil is likely to pay the city of Sao Paulo 726 million reais ($413 million) to handle its payroll, the largest of any municipality in the country, Valor Economico newspaper reported (Reuters).

Brazil’s largest banks are too expensive after an “absurd” rally this year spurred by prospects they will accelerate lending to meet rising consumer demand, according to Mercatto Gestao de Recursos (Bloomberg).

ENERGY

Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega confirmed that the government will extend tax breaks to certain vehicles deemed environmentally friendly (Reuters).

Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras SA, aka as Eletrobras, Latin America’s largest power utility, aims to invest in U.S. electricity transmission in coming years, an executive said (Bloomberg).

POLITICS

Whoever wins, Brazil should remain in capable hands after its presidential election. Read the analysis in The Economist’s The world in 2010

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Brasilia seeking support for his controversial nuclear program, the first leg of a South American tour that critics say could dent Brazil’s ambitions on the global diplomatic stage (Reuters).

Brazil will have created 1.3 million payroll jobs by the end of 2009, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said, as Latin America’s largest economy recovered from a brief recession (Reuters).

The U.S. is responsible for the crisis in the Middle East and shouldn’t be coordinating peace talks for the region, Brazilian President Lula said. Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians ought to be managed by the United Nations, Lula said in an interview today with two local radio stations in Salvador, Bahia state, where he met Palestinian Authority President Abbas (Bloomberg).

INVESTMENT

Ford Motor Co unveiled plans to invest 4 billion reais ($2.26 billion) to boost output in Brazil as record-low borrowing costs and a rapid economic recovery in Latin America’s largest country stoke demand for new cars (Reuters).

ArcelorMittal is seriously considering a feasibility study for a new steel plant in Brazil as it sees strong prospects for demand there, a senior executive said (Reuters).

Mozambique has signed two accords with Brazil for a $6 billion investment in biofuel exploration, the daily independent O Pais reported, citing António de Godoy, chairperson of the Brazilian confederation of biofuel companies Arranjo Produtivo Local do Alcool (APLA) (Bloomberg).

Four Seasons and Jumeirah Group plan to open their first hotels in Brazil as rising incomes in Latin America’s largest economy and the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games generate demand (Bloomberg).

OIL

Brazil’s lower house of Congress approved a law creating a state holding company to manage new projects in the country’s recently discovered “sub-salt” oil reserves. The creation of the company, called Petrosal, is one of four laws sent to Congress by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva aimed at boosting state control over the huge oil reserves (Reuters).

SHIPPING

Brazilian iron ore miner Vale said that it was building 16 vessels with a capacity of 400,000 tonnes each to carry iron ore between Brazil and Asia (Reuters).

BUSINESS

Embraer has signed a $177.5 million deal with Oman Air for five 175 aircraft, its chief executive said (Reuters).

POLITICS

Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s preferred successor, is a more interesting politician than she appears to be. But would she be different from her boss? Read the analysis in The Economist.

Politics, morality and dresscodes. A student gets suspended for wearing very short skirts. Read the story in The Economist.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva joined forces to step up pressure for an agreement at next month’s climate change meeting in Copenhagen (Reuters).

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva rejected criticism over the Iranian president’s visit to the South American country later this month, saying all sides needed to be involved to achieve peace in the Middle East (Reuters).

ECONOMY

Brazil takes off! Now the risk for Latin America’s big success story is hubris, says The Economist.

Brazil used to be all promise. Now it is beginning to deliver, says John Prideaux in The Economist special report on Brazilian finance.

Brazil’s currency, the real, is overvalued, said the country’s finance minister, Guido Mantega, speaking at a televised event in Sao Paulo. The country welcomes foreign investors, he said, but has concerns about the “exaggerated” valuation of the currency (Reuters).

President Lula is confident Brazil’s economy will grow by 5 percent in 2010 and expects foreign reserves to reach $300 billion soon, he told the Financial Times in an interview published (Reuters).

Brazil’s economy may have expanded about 9 percent in the third quarter, Lula said in his weekly newspaper column published today on Diario de Pernambuco website (Bloomberg).

OIL

Spanish oil group Repsol may tap the stock market with its Brazilian unit to help finance an expected $10 billion plus in oil exploration in Brazil in the next decade, its president said (Reuters).

Petrobras said it found oil in deep waters off Angola (Reuters).

Brazilian energy company OGX said it boosted estimated hydrocarbon resources to 6.7 billion barrels from 4.8 billion barrels (Reuters).

ENERGY

Brazil’s president denied that underinvestment was to blame for the worst power outage in a decade, which left a huge swath of the country in the dark for more than five hours and raised doubts about the reliability of its energy infrastructure (Reuters).

INVESTMENT

Nacional Minerios SA, the mining unit of steelmaker CSN, plans to invest $1.3 billion in two iron-ore pellet plants in Brazil (Bloomberg).

BANKING

Bank of Nova Scotia, Canada’s third- largest bank, wants to have a “small niche” in Brazil to expand in Latin America, its Chief Executive Officer said (Bloomberg).

POLITICS

Until the end of last month, Eskom, the state-owned power company, was mainly known for its inefficiency and incompetence. Power cuts have been maddeningly common throughout the country. But now the company has been engulfed by another, much more South African, sort of row, about race. Read the story in The Economist

ECONOMY

Brazil will publish on Monday a preliminary list of U.S. goods it intends to hit with trade sanctions in retaliation for Washington’s cotton subsidies, a senior government official told Reuters.

Emboldened by emergency measures that helped pull Brazil out of a brief recession, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is intervening more aggressively in the economy and betting on big government (Reuters).

Brazilian congressional committees passed two of four bills designed to overhaul the country’s oil legislation and give the government greater control over vast new offshore reserves (Reuters).

BUSINESS

Mexico’s state oil company Pemex said it signed a letter of intent with a consortium led by Brazil’s Braskem SA to supply raw materials for a proposed petrochemicals plant the consortium may build in Mexico (Reuters).

Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer will produce its 120-seat E-190 jet in China to respond faster when the country’s aviation market recovers, O Estado de S. Paulo said (Reuters).

Brazilian iron ore mining company Vale signed an agreement worth 900 million reais ($520 million) over three years granting access to its railway and port operations to local steel maker Usiminas (Reuters).

ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, will partner with mining giant Vale to build a steel mill in southeastern Brazil as part of a plan to spend $5 billion in the South American country, Chief Executive Officer Lakshmi Mittal told daily Valor Economico (Reuters).

OIL & GAS

Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras said it signed an agreement to buy Chevron Chile, a producer and seller of industrial lubricants under the brand name Texaco in Chile, for around $12 million (Reuters).

Brazil’s Petrobras has found natural gas in Peru’s Amazon jungle and the discovery of about 1 trillion cubic feet could turn out to be much larger, Peruvian President Alan Garcia said (Reuters).

INVESTMENT

Gerdau, Brazil’s largest steelmaker, plans capital expenditures of 9.5 billion reais ($5.5 billion) for the 2010-2014 period, with around 80 percent of the investments within Brazil, Chief Executive Andre Gerdau Johannpeter said (Reuters).

REAL ESTATE

Brazil, a future host of the World Cup and the Olympics, is drawing global investor interest to its real estate sector. As investors and analysts predict a wave of investment in Brazil in coming months, read a sampling of recent deals at Reuters.

TELECOM

America Movil Chief Financial Officer Varlos Garcia Moreno said Brazil’s economic resilience will help its wireless industry outpace other Latin American countries through 2010 (Bloomberg).

BANKING

Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, will become a major financial center, “just like the City of London, Frankfurt and New York,” said Emilio Botin, chairman of Banco Santander SA (Bloomberg).

ECONOMY

Brazil’s primary budget fell into deficit last month, posting its worst result for the month of September on record, as tax revenues continued to trail an incipient rebound in Latin America’s largest economy (Reuters).

Brazil extended stimulus tax cuts on home appliances even as an economic recovery shows signs of gaining momentum (Bloomberg).

BUSINESS

Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer expects a reduction in spending on research and development and an increase in revenue to boost profit margins in the fourth quarter, Chief Financial Officer Luiz Carlos Aguiar said (Reuters).

The company, the world’s third-largest maker of commercial aircraft, foresees a 10 percent drop in revenue in 2010 (Reuters).

The Brazilian unit of French commodities group Louis Dreyfus said it agreed to take over Brazilian firm Santelisa Vale to create the world’s second largest sugar cane processor (Reuters).

General Motors said Brazil’s car market has “a very good outlook” and the automaker will reinvest profits from the country’s unit locally, Chief Executive Fritz Henderson told newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo in an interview (Reuters).

POLITICS

Honduras de facto government has started proceedings at the U.N. court in The Hague to stop Brazil giving refuge to ousted President Manuel Zelaya in its embassy in Tegucigalpa (Reuters).

Brazil’s Senate foreign relations committee approved Venezuela’s request to join the South American trade bloc Mercosur despite concerns over President Hugo Chavez’s thwarting of democracy (Reuters).

OIL

Brazil’s Congress began discussing proposals to change oil sector laws including one measure that would create a production-sharing model to replace the existing concession system in future oil projects. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is trying to boost state control over the massive subsalt oil deposits that could turn Brazil into a major energy exporter (Reuters).

Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras may change a plan to process more heavy crude at its Okinawa refinery, currently dedicated to lighter grades, its top executive said (Reuters).

A private initiative for the development of Paramaribo’s waterfront received approval from the Surinam government. The Riverside Harbour Village, as the project is known, includes a marina, a new hotel as well as commercial space and a promenade. Though the project still needs some additional financing, the backers, who hail from Surinam, Curacao and the Netherlands, think the Village will be ready by 2015. The project is worth 46 million Euros in investment (De Ware Tijd).

The Surinam Planning Dept annouced economic growth is expected to drop from 5% this year ot just 1% in 2010. The Dept. blames this disappointing outlook among other things on diminishing exports of oil and bauxite (De Ware Tijd).

In a new publication “Best in 2010″ Lonely Planet travel guide recommends Surinam for the top places to go to in 2010 (Reuters).