Brazil Finance Minister Fernando Haddad is “optimistic” he will keep his promise to deliver a balanced budget next year, but only if congress does its part to help him zero the primary fiscal deficit, he said in an interview Friday.
Haddad successfully steered his first major initiative — a fiscal framework plan to replace Brazil’s so-called spending cap rule — through congress earlier this year. But his efforts to generate the revenue necessary to offset a proposed 129 billion-real ($25.4 billion) spending increase in 2024 have at times faced pushback from lawmakers skeptical of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy.
