In a sense, there is something rather liberating about the Petrobras fourth quarter and annual report for 2015. It is indeed a miserable financial report with a sizable loss of BRL 36.9 billion (USD 10.2 billion) for the quarter and a very similar BRL 34.8 billion (USD 9.6 billion) for the full year. But even though this is a historically large deficit and almost two-thirds as big as in the same period last year, the reasons are at least somewhat mundane: