Fitch raised Brazil’s foreign-currency debt rating to BBB-, the lowest investment-grade level, from BB+, matching a move made by S&P on April 30. The increase will give the South American country better access to capital markets because some institutional investors can only buy securities issued by countries with at least two investment-grade ratings. [...]

The yield on the government’s zero-coupon bonds due January 2010 fell 19 basis points, or 0.19 percentage point, today to 14.31 percent, according to Banco Bradesco SA. The extra yield investors demand to own Brazil’s dollar bonds rather than Treasuries shrank 16 basis points to 1.91 percentage points, the narrowest since Nov. 7, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s EMBI Plus index.

The Fitch move “is potentially the door opening to some investors who now can buy Brazil in the fixed-income market,” said Geoffrey Pazzanese, who helps manage $44 billion in global stocks at Federated Investors Inc. in New York.

The risk of owning Brazilian bonds fell to the lowest since May 19, according to Bloomberg data. Five-year credit default swaps based on the country’s debt dropped 6 basis points to 0.895 percentage point. That means it costs $89,500 to protect $10 million of the country’s debt from default.

“Brazilian companies have become global leaders in key industries,” says Manraaj Singh in Profit Watch.

“Companhia Vale do Rio Doce is now the world’s biggest iron-ore producer. State-owned oil company, Petrobras, overtook Mircrosoft to become the world’s sixth-biggest company by market capitalisation last week. Petrobras is sitting on the Western Hemisphere’s largest oil discovery in three decades. Possibly even the third-biggest oil field in the world!

“These are names that are going to become much more familiar to us in the decades ahead.

“Brazil isn’t just an emerging oil giant… it’s also the biggest producer of the only truly commercially viable alternative to oil – sugar-based ethanol.”

As the world’s lowest cost ethanol producer, Brazil has a big advantage over other countries, says Mike Burnick in The Offshore A-Letter:

“Neither U.S. corn-based ethanol, nor wheat-based ethanol from Europe, can come close to matching the Brazilians on a production cost basis.

“The sugarcane plant, which flourishes in Brazil’s tropical climate, produces a ‘yield’ of 6,000 liters of ethanol per hectare of land. That’s about twice the yield of corn-based ethanol!

In fact, Brazilian ethanol is about 40% cheaper to make than in the US – and costs less than half the price of European ethanol.”