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STANDARD ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES RARELY APPLY IN Brazil. But one law has stood the test of time: the length of a Finance Minister's tenure is inversely proportional to the rate of inflation. With prices rising 28% a month, President Itamar Franco put Finance Minister Paulo Haddad on the firing line, berating him and criticizing his policies in public. Haddad, who had barely 10 weeks to settle into the job, resigned and was replaced by former Transport Minister Eliseu Resende. He is the third Finance Minister since Franco took office five months ago and Brazil's ninth in the past eight years.

At his first press conference the new Minister, not an economist but an engineer, said that what Brazil needed was some "genetic engineering of the numbers." To nervous businessmen that sounded ominously like a another price freeze. Resende firmly denied that he has any miracle cures in mind. But if he hopes to keep his job for very long, Resende will have to move fast to placate his impatient boss and rescue his inflation-weary countrymen. For the record: over the past 25 years prices have risen 1,825,059,944,842.56%.