The Brazilian currency strengthened to BRL1.7722 to the dollar, from BRL1.7809 at the end of active trading Monday, according to Tullett Prebon via Factset.

China reported its gross domestic product expanded by 8.9% during the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier, topping consensus targets for 8.7% growth.

“Growth was faster than expected, and that surprised the market,” said Ovidio Soares, a trader at the Interbolsa brokerage in Sao Paulo. “China is our biggest trading partner, so this is creating more optimism.”

China’s full-year growth slowed to 9.2% in 2011, from 10.4% in 2010. Analysts said Tuesday’s data suggest that China’s economy is headed for a steady slowdown rather than a hard landing.

Key commodities such as oil, copper and gold are soaring higher Tuesday. China buys a wide variety of commodities from Brazil, including iron ore and soy beans.

Financial markets received some good news from Europe Tuesday as well. German economic expectations have improved far more in January than predicted, as improved U.S. economic data, falling Spanish and Italian government bond yields and the European Central Bank’s generous supply of liquidity gave rise to optimism, Germany’s Center for European Economic Research, also known as ZEW, said Tuesday.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

But after Mr. Zweig, despondent over the advances of the Nazis, took his own life here a few months later at age 60 in a suicide pact with his young wife, Lotte, he became known in his adopted country for creating one of most hackneyed phrases ever associated with Brazil: “Country of the Future.”

With Brazil’s prospects now notably improved, Brazilians are reassessing Mr. Zweig and his legacy as the book’s title gains new currency yet again, with everyone from advertising executives to visiting European diplomats and even President Obama, who visited Brazil in March, using it in a speech to suggest that perhaps Brazil’s “future” has finally arrived.

“Brazilisn’t the country of the future anymore,” said Romero Rodrigues, a Brazilian Internet entrepreneur, in one typical new repackaging of the term. “It’s the country of the present.”

The house where Mr. Zweig took his own life here by swallowing poison is set to reopen soon as a museum. Meanwhile, Brazilian writers and historians have been reflecting on the significance of “Land of the Future,” and some of the political intrigue surrounding its publication 70 years ago.

In a recent televised discussion of Mr. Zweig, Alcino Leite Neto, editor of the publishing house Publifolha, compared his importance inBrazilto that in the United States of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker who wrote about American concepts of liberty and equality in “Democracy inAmerica.”

“We had Stefan Zweig,” said Mr. Leite Neto, “who left us this book advocating tolerance, comprehension between people, an indictment in favor of peace, written right during World War II.”

A broader appreciation of his work is also under way, with two Brazilian feature films in production adapted from his writing, one from “The Invisible Collection,” aboutGermany’s experience with inflation, and another from “Leporella,” about a housemaid who becomes infatuated with her employer.

But it is “Land of the Future” itself (published here since the 1940s in various editions as “Country of the Future”), and Mr. Zweig’s wanderings inBrazilbefore his death, which have recently ignited the most interest.

Cultural officials in Petrópolis this year organized a multimedia exhibit called “Stefan Zweig Lives!”, and some Brazilians have begun joining the Europeans and Americans who occasionally appear in the city to see his house onGonçalves Dias Street, or even the cemetery where he and Lotte are buried side by side.

“It’s a little strange taking someone to the places of such tragedy, but we’re happy to receive every kind of visitor,” said Walter Raposo, 80, a horse-carriage driver in Petrópolis who has guided several Zweig aficionados to these spots; they find Mr. Raposo and his carriage in front of the Brazilian emperor’s former summer palace, now a museum.

Alberto Dines, a television host and eminence among Brazil’s journalists who met Mr. Zweig as a child when the writer visited his school in Rio de Janeiro, has been a driving force behind the renewed attention in Petrópolis and beyond.

His research and his own book on Mr. Zweig, “Death in Paradise,” explore in detail the complicated origins of the book’s title, which Mr. Dines explains was not Mr. Zweig’s creation but a suggestion from James Stern, who translated his book into English from the German.

In a touch of irony, Mr. Zweig, born in Vienna’s golden age to affluent Jewish parents, alluded in the book’s epigraph to a line in French, “une terre d’avenir,” from correspondence received by Arthur de Gobineau, a 19th-century French aristocrat, diplomat and theorist of European racial superiority who detested Brazil.

“It’s a curious thing, because Gobineau was the father of modern racism,” said Mr. Dines, who at age 79 is overseeing the completion of Casa Stefan Zweig, the museum created at the house where Mr. Zweig lived. “Coming from racist Europe, Zweig was amazed seeing the different races mixing so freely in Brazil.”

Of course, some contend Mr. Zweig’s largely optimistic observations on race relations at the time belied circumstances that were considerably more complex — and continue to be as affirmative action programs spreading across Brazil seek to reverse centuries of exclusion.

Still, Mr. Zweig’s optimism was not dimmed by the obvious challenges in Brazil in the early 1940s, like an average life expectancy of 43 years and a population that was 56 percent illiterate. Some of his sanguine assessments continue to impress today.

He claimed, for instance, that Portugal had been farsighted by colonizing Brazil partly by emptying Portuguese prisons of undesired elements and sending them across the Atlantic. “As usual, it is not altogether clean manure which is the earth’s best preparation for future harvests,” Mr. Zweig wrote.

Mr. Zweig’s reappraisal here coincides with renewed crisis in Europe — and with a new wave of Portuguese emigration to Brazil, but this time of unemployed professionals, not convicts. Some of those seeking opportunity in Brazil may even know that Mr. Zweig remains highly esteemed in parts of Europe, especially France, where his books are still widely available.

Strangely, Mr. Zweig’s book on Brazil was fiercely criticized in Brazil shortly after its publication. Critics laid waste to the Austrian writer with vehemence, opening him to insinuation that he was paid by the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas to write the book.

Mr. Dines said the scathing reviews had been a way for reviewers to indirectly get back at Mr. Vargas’s censors, since the critics equated praising Brazil with praising its dictatorship. Either way, the author of numerous best sellers had little need for Brazil’s financial support.

But Mr. Zweig did need something else at the time: a haven from the Nazis. Mr. Dines, based on his own research of Mr. Zweig’s path to Brazil, argues that the writer had an implicit deal with Brazilian authorities to produce his book in exchange for the residence permits hastily granted in Buenos Aires to him and his wife.

After all that, some mystery persists as to why he would kill himself soon after arriving in Brazil. He had acknowledged that a lifetime might be insufficient to properly understand Brazil. But in the suicide note he left describing himself as “one without a country,” he still had only praise for the “marvelous” Brazil that received him.

“After I saw the country of my own language fall, and my spiritual land —Europe— destroying itself,” he concluded, “it would require immense strength to reconstruct my life.”

Source: NY Times

Brazilian state-run energy company Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR, PETR4.BR), or Petrobas, said Monday it has received two bids for a contract to build 21 offshore drill rigs that will help the company develop recently discovered offshore, said Monday it has received two bids for a contract to build 21 offshore drill rigs that will help the company develop recently discovered offshore, said Monday it has received two bids for a contract to build 21 offshore drill rigs that will help the company develop recently discovered offshore, said Monday it has received two bids for a contract to build 21 offshore drill rigs that will help the company develop recently discovered offshore, said Monday it has received two bids for a contract to build 21 offshore drill rigs that will help the company develop recently discovered offshore