BRASIL: Judge Blocks Building Massive Belo Monte Dam.

BBC/ With Map/

    In a setback to Brasil's decrepit infrastructure and rapidly growing power needs, federal Judge Ronaldo Desterro blocked construction of the Amazon's massive $11 billion usd hydro-electric Belo Monte dam...because of environmental concerns.
    Desterro cited 29 environmental conditions not met like the recovery of degraded areas and measures to guarantee the navigability of rivers.
    He also stopped BNDES, the national development bank, from financing the project.
    The11,000-megawatt dam would be the biggest in the world after the Three Gorges in China and  Brasil's own Itaipu. 
    Three previous injunctions have been overturned.

    Environmentalists claim the 6km dam threatens indigena groups and would make as many as 50,000 people homeless.

BRASIL: Mantegna To Slash Development Bank Spending By 50% To Lower Interest Rates.

BLOOMBERG/
     Brasil will cut funding for its state development bank, BNDES, by 50 percent in 2011 to help lower the world’s second-highest inflation-adjusted interest rates.
    Finance Minister Guido Mantega reports that Brasil's rates are second only to Croatia among 46 countries tracked by Bloomberg and is paying 965 basis points more to borrow locally than abroad. The country’s local debt even yields more than troubled Greece and Ireland. He says that is unacceptable.
    

BRASIL: Profiling Rousseff's Economic Advisor: Luciano Coutinho.

BLOOMBERG/ Matthew Bristow and Joshua Goodman /
     Some financial analysts are betting that Luciano Coutinho, 64, Dilma Rousseff’s economics professor at Campinas University, will become one of her top policy advisers, possibly finance minister, when she takes office in January. Since 2007, Coutinho has headed the Rio-based bank known as BNDES.
   Here's a link to a profile of Coutinho and his economic policies.
  Apparently, Coutinho belongs to the “developmentalist” school of economics that pushed for high tariffs and state-led investment in the 1970s to boost Brazil’s industrial capacity.