Brazilian oil workers with the FUP oil union have threatened a nationwide strike, in what seems like another step toward nationalized oil in Brazil

The saber rattling is aimed at Brazil’s biggest oil company, Petrobras (NYSE: PBR). While contentious union relations at Petrobras are part and parcel of the company’s operations, what’s different here is that the conversation focuses on the pre-salt layer off Brazil, triggered by last year’s massive Tupi find.

The newest breakthrough revealed these discoveries are likely to be contiguous, falling under a new set of guidelines that precariously lean toward nationalization of Brazilian oil...

So you’re watching the Olympic Games and the usual suspects appear as advertisers… There’s Visa, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s…and BHP Billiton (NYSE ADR:BHP)? Who are those guys, anyway?

It does seem unusual for one of the biggest mining companies to sponsor the Beijing Games.

But as it turns out, this massive marketing campaign wasn’t targeted at Joe Sixpack watching the Olympics.

It was payback to Beijing, says Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits.

The former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has pointed out that the country’s new middle class is very different from the one Latin America experienced in the 1940s and 1970s: more dependent on the market than on the state.

It’s no coincidence that this market-driven generation is buying up cell phones like crazy.

What that means is market-driven economies, and the entrepreneurs that thrive in them, rely on real-time communications to run their businesses.

The biggest rap about investing in emerging markets has been that they suffer from out-of-control inflation. The high prices of food and fuel undermined otherwise strong economic progress in emerging nations. On a conservative estimate, food-price rises may reduce the spending power of the urban poor and country people who buy their own food by 20%, according to the Economist.

Emerging markets have been victims of the U.S. economic malaise. But that trend could be reversing, says Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits.

Now could be the time to get back into undervalued markets such as Brazil, Russia, Vietnam, Mexico whose economies have run up in conjunction with the commodity boom.

The emerging market turnaround comes at a time when commodity prices are falling off their multi-year average highs.