His crisis too: Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Until a few months ago, as financial and economic turmoil gripped the industrialised world, Latin America was suffused with optimism that it would escape the worst. “People ask me about the crisis and I answer, ‘go ask Bush’,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said of his US counterpart in early September. “It is his crisis, not mine.”