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- <text id=93TT1172>
- <title>
- Mar. 15, 1993: Who's Next!
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 15, 1993 In the Name of God
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 20
- BUSINESS
- Who's Next!
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Revolving doors at Brazil's Finance Ministry
- </p>
- <p> Standard economic principles rarely apply in Brazil. But one
- law has stood the test of time: the length of a Finance
- Minister's tenure is inversely proportional to the rate of
- inflation. With prices rising 28% a month, President Itamar
- Franco put Finance Minister Paulo Haddad on the firing line,
- berating him and criticizing his policies in public. Haddad, who
- had barely 10 weeks to settle into the job, resigned and was
- replaced by former Transport Minister Eliseu Resende. He is the
- third Finance Minister since Franco took office five months ago
- and Brazil's ninth in the past eight years.
- </p>
- <p> At his first press conference the new Minister, not an
- economist but an engineer, said that what Brazil needed was
- some "genetic engineering of the numbers." To nervous
- businessmen that sounded ominously like a another price freeze.
- Resende firmly denied that he has any miracle cures in mind. But
- if he hopes to keep his job for very long, Resende will have to
- move fast to placate his impatient boss and rescue his
- inflation-weary countrymen. For the record: over the past 25
- years prices have risen 1,825,059,944,842.56%.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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