Brazil CB may boos buying dollars

Bloomberg

The central bank began buying dollars on May 8, initiating "step one" in its bid to temper the real’s advance to a seven-month high, said Mike Moran, a currency strategist at Standard Chartered. Meirelles’s comments were "step two - upgrade the level of verbal intervention."

"And step three is clearly much more aggressive interventions," Moran said in a phone interview from New York. He predicts the currency will gain to 1.9 per dollar by year-end from 2.0311 Thursday.

The real is up 20.5 percent since March 2, the biggest advance among the six most-traded currencies in Latin America, as prices on commodity exports rebounded and investor demand for emerging markets picked up. It’s up 14 percent this year, more than all 16 major currencies except for South Africa’s rand.