Few businesses chose to take advantage of the other incentives made available by Rousseff’s administration, and Brazil’s investment rate proved stubbornly low. Indeed, there is evidence that companies took the cheap loans simply in order to invest in government paper. In such cases, the government was effectively subsidising companies to leave mone

China was another crunch issue. The foreign minister Ernesto Araújo wanted to reduce ties with China and talked about promoting links with India, Japan and South Korea. Bolsonaro himself had protested during his campaign that China was buying up Brazil and had objected to the way it was making strategic investments in areas such as minerals and ene

authoritarians – from the US to Brazil, Eastern Europe, Russia and China – offered simplistic slogans and blamed foreign forces whereas countries need real leadership and international cooperation to be more resilient.

Once elected, Lula backed up his commitment to stability by appointing Henrique Meirelles, a banker who had contested the election as a candidate for a senatorial seat for Cardoso’s PSDB party, to the central bank. The incoming finance minister, Antônio Palocci, appointed a series of ‘market-friendly’ technocrats to advise him. Palocci had been a T

One columnist called him the “president of small things”.24 In her colourful account of Bolsonaro’s crises, Thaís Oyama notes that big – and perhaps more abstract – policy questions were of no interest to Brazil’s leader. She quotes an adviser who saw Paulo Guedes try to explain macro-economic ideas to Bolsonaro during the election campaign. “It wa