Brasília, 1/18/2006 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - After a meeting that lasted four hours and 46 minutes, the Central Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (Comitê de Política Monetária) (Copom) announced that it had unanimously decided to reduce the country's basic interest rate (Selic) by 0.75 percentage points. Thus Brazil's benchmark interest rate went from 18% to 17.25% per year.

The meeting was the second longest since the Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva administration took office and Henrique Meirelles became head of the Central Bank (another meeting in February 2003 took over five hours).

Translation: Allen Bennett