Dear rss free blog,
Today I am virtually cut off
from the world in a tiny indigenous village of 20 families reachable only from
the rivers, the Amazon, and the Valeria, its tributary. And the ship to shore
Internet is down. So I will focus on a few items of news for the subscribers
which I collected at an earlier Indian town where linkage was better,
Parintins.
For paid subscribers we have
a solution discussed below.
The Amazon is thick and there
is not much you can grow under the rainforest canopy or the steep sandstone cliffs
up from the river’s floodplain. The forest holds few people because there is
not much to eat beyond fish and brazil nuts. That was shown by the ships we saw
in the Parintins harbor being unloaded: they carried eggs and flour, long-life
milk and machinery. The locals have a nutty annual festival called Boi Bomba,
which earns them money, but mainly survive by producing cotton knit garments to
pay for the imported foods.
Now for the news, about deals
being made in the waning days of 2009. One lesson is that news that a discovery
will be financed with megabuck upfront payments from a drug major does not mean
the startup’s stock price will go up.
The deals are being done to
get in before the tax year ends, which a helpful reader has reminded us is Dec.
24 in
Canada and Dec. 28 in
the US, to leave time for settling trades.
The hot economic news here is
that Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf), a local big retailer, will spin off its
Internet and appliance subs with American Depositary Receipts some time in the
latter half of 2010.
With concern over the
relatively slow US economic
growth figure (2.2% means it will be 8 years before we are back on track from
before the crisis), Brazil
faces hardship in its materials industries. But even more than China, it can
generate its own growth because of the needs of its population.
Meanwhile your editor’s
dollars translate into more reais; the trouble is that the market vendors in
the rainforest do not know this and won’t listen to my arguments in my best
Gulbenkian Portuguese. So am confining my purchases to what I can do with reais
or plastic.
Até logo.
