LOSERS^511ready to make light of this volatility on the pretext that the certainty
of inflation was a form of stability.
This may have been true for those Brazilians able to take
precautions; but inflation played havoc with Brazil's international
credit, and this country needed to borrow. It also needed to trade
and work with other countries, especially those rich, capitalist nations
that were marked as the enemy. So Cardoso began to see things
differendy, to the point where observers praised him as a pragmatist,
"without a strong ideological core."^36 Gone now were the
anticolonialist passions; gone the hostility to foreign links, with their
implicit dependency. Brazil has no choice, says Cardoso. If it is not
prepared to be part of the global economy, it has "no way of
competing. ... It is not an imposition from the outside. It's a
necessity for us."^37
To each time its virtues. Two years later Cardoso was elected
president, in large part because he had given Brazil its first strong
currency in many years: the real, rated at slightiy more than a dollar.
The real is still there, and what a boost to national pride: more than
a dollar!
Epilogue: A stable currency does not cure all. As of mid-1996,
public finances showed a larger deficit; export growth had slowed;
real product fell in the first quarter; real interest rates, though lower,
were still prohibitive; and productivity gains in manufacturing had
fallen sharply, indeed, to negative rates in such key sectors as
metallurgy, machinery, and textiles in 1995.^38