Even in Brazil, a country that is no stranger to crisis, the recent, rapid-fire succession of financial, economic and political blows has been breathtaking.
After a week in which the nation’s top young financier was thrown in jail alongside a senator — pushing his bank into a struggle for survival — and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warned the economy was slipping into a full-blown depression, impeachment proceedings were initiated late Wednesday against President Dilma Rousseff.
Though the hearings will ultimately center on whether Rousseff violated fiscal laws, the root of her widespread unpopularity is the same that landed the banker, Andre Esteves, in jail and crippled the economy: an unprecedented corruption scandal that’s hamstrung the country’s biggest companies and triggered policy paralysis in the capital city. With gross domestic product now shrinking at an annualized pace of almost 7 percent and the budget deficit swelling to the widest in at least two decades, Brazil’s currency and local bond markets have posted deeper losses than those of any other developing nation this year.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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