The following comes to us courtesy of our correspondent in Rio de Janeiro, Mac Margolis. --BS

Every world class crisis needs a good gaffe artist. At that, George W. (“Mission accomplished”) Bush was au concours. But now that W is out of range, at least we have Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The megapopular Brazilian president – “my man,” Barack Obama exclaimed - draws deserved kudos for (so far) keeping the world’s 9^th largest economy from going over a cliff. But lately the onetime lathe operator has developed a reputation for opening his mouth only to change feet.

Last week, on the eve of the G20 consort, standing beside Gordon Brown, the Brazilian leader went off script and managed to make even the pasty complexioned British prime minister blanch by telling a sea of reporters that the world financial meltdown was the work of  “blue eyed white people.” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and eugenics was not included in the G20 recovery package. But the remark caused a stink. “Brazil’s Lula too Weird to be a Global Leader,” was the headline of Alexandre Marinis’s Bloomberg column.

Marinis went on to recall some other of Lula’s lulus. “My mother was born illiterate,” Lula once remarked, in a comment meant to encourage adult education. On another occasion, on a visit to Windhoek, he found the Namibian capital “so clean it doesn’t even look like it’s in Africa.” This from the man who advertizes his efforts to forge closer “South to South” ties.

Maybe it’s the klieg lights. After all when the pressure is on and the world is watching even the most adored of global rainmakers can misspeak, a habit that keeps the media in red meat 24/7. But if Lula regretted his faux pas, he wasn’t letting on. After all, the former union leader cut his teeth on the picket lines, hurling barbs and broadsides at the captains of industry and government on the other side of the barricades. And even though to the delight of international investors and lenders, he has mostly shed that woolly past and kept Brazil admirably solid and solvent, he still occasionally slips back into that ornery default mode, his intemperance rising like Peter Sellar’s errant arm in Dr. Strangelove.

By the end of the G20 talks, after rubbing shoulders with the mighty and a photo op with Queen Elizabeth, the Brazilian leader was positively radiant. He even offered to help top up the International Monetary Fund’s coffers with Brazil’s cache of hard currency reserves. “I started my career marching and carrying signs saying “Down with the IMF!” Lula recalls. “Don’t you think it’s positively chic that now we are offering to lend money to the IMF?” How do you say touché in Portuguese?

AP Photo / Scott Sady

This is a sentence you don't ever want to read:

"The quality of the US census may be undermined because of rising numbers of people living in garages, tents, basements and motels as the financial crisis deepens."

That's from the Financial Times, which says that "there is little data on the rise in 'non-traditional' housing, which is something the Census Bureau will generate for the first time as it seeks people out this year." The Bureau will hire 2,000 additional census-takers to deal with this population, which is usually small enough to fly under the radar.

And if the rise in "non-traditional" housing in the U.S. is large enough to impact a census that will count over 300 million people, I wonder what the impact has been in hard-hit developing nations like those in Eastern Europe?

For more on the human impact of the housing bubble's burst, view our photo gallery.

But there's more to that story. Wealth of Nations' own Mike Hirsh actually talked to Swagel for his column this week. In the process, he learned that Geithner's new plan for toxic legacy assets had its roots in an idea Warren Buffett proposed to Paulson back in October, backed by PIMCO's Bill Gross and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein. But Paulson rejected the idea, instead placing his bets on fast-track capital injections as the financial world crumbled around him. Why does this matter now? Mike says the issue goes straight to the heart of a still-unresolved philosophical divide--even within the Obama administration--over just how broken the Street's machinery really is. Pretty fundamental stuff, really.

To recap: Swagel gives you the inside view. Mike gives you the big picture. Both are must-reads.

(Photo of Philip Swagel by Haraz N. Ghanbar / AP)

G20 Recap: The biggest win was an additional $1.1 trillion in funding for international aid agencies, and Jeffrey Sachs said simply that the results were "deeply heartening." Dani Rodrik called it a "a victory for the Europeans." Felix Salmon at Reuters said the resultant statement was "more substantive and harder-hitting" than most. Paul Krugman, who had veered toward pessimism lately, called the results  "substantive and important ." But a New York Times editorial felt the whole thing "fell short." Across the pond at the Guardian, Mark Thoma said that the failure to arrive at an international stimulus package was "bad for the US, and bad for the world more generally."

Slowdown? What Slowdown?: McKinsey expects China to have more than four million "wealthy" (i.e. an annual income greater than $36,500) households by 2015, up from 1.6 million last year. That would give it the fourth-highest number of wealthy families living within its borders, after the U.S., Japan and Britain.

Say Goodbye to Another 663,000 Jobs: A total of 5.3 million jobs have been lost in the U.S. since the start of the recession. Unemployment hit 8.5 percent in March, the highest figure since 1983.

Havens No More: Four countries were publicly shamed by the G20 as offshore tax havens -- the Philippines, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay -- and they're already implementing damage control.

Tweet Tweet: No, this news isn't directly related to the global crisis, but some of you might consider it a crisis of culture: Google is in talks to acquire Twitter. Insert your own joke about how the deal's announcement will have to be made in 140 characters or less. 

(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)