The writing was on the wall. But when Brazil's left-wing president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva visited China recently, he flamboyantly underscored economic and security ties between Latin America's largest democracy and the world's largest dictatorship. Significantly he took steps to decouple much of Brazil's vibrant commerce from using the US dollar and shifting the trade instead to the Chinese currency, the yuan.
Effectively Mr Lula threw a Bric at the US dollar, and the game is only getting started.
