Pacheco says Brazil is obsessed with falling interest rates – 04/20/2023 – Market

With the presence in the audience of the president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), made a tough demand for the drop in interest rates, saying that it is an issue that unites Brazil at this time .

“If there is something that unites us, it is the impression, the desire, the obstinacy to reduce the interest rate”, said Pacheco during his participation in London at a conference by the Lide group.

In a warning tone, the President of the Senate told Campos Neto that the BC’s autonomy, provided for by law, will begin to be questioned if interest rates do not quickly decrease from the current level of 13.75%.

“We approved the autonomy of the Central Bank, but the perspective of this autonomy was so that the BC would not be susceptible to undue interference. But there is a general feeling that we need to find ways to immediately reduce the interest rate, under penalty of sacrificing this work that we have established in recent years”, he declared.

According to Pacheco, several institutional gains made in recent years will lose effectiveness if the Selic rate does not fall. “We have generated good results: inflation contained, with a downward trend, our currency stable. Now we need to grow Brazil, and we were not able to with the interest rate at 13.75%”, he stated.

The president of the Senate also defended the approval of the fiscal framework and the tax reform, but said that a premise must be that there is no increase in the tax burden. It is necessary to find other forms of collection, according to him.

“There are several sources of revenue without creating new taxes. Creating new taxes would be intolerable,” he said. He cited two examples: the taxation of online games and new ways of charging fines from concessionary companies.

In a veiled message to the current federal government, Pacheco asked for respect for matters already approved by Congress. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the PT have defended the reversal of several projects approved in the past, such as labor reform, the sanitation framework and the reform of secondary education, for example.

“We need to respect the past. There were options made by the Brazilian Parliament. We voted for political reform, labor reform, spending limits, legal frameworks for sanitation, railroads, cabotage, exchange rate system. These legislative options must be respected, because, even if not are ideal, it’s much better to have stability and predictability, to know that that’s the rule in Brazil,” he said.

Journalist Fábio Zanini traveled at the invitation of Lide.