The Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, responsible for the political articulation of the federal government, downplayed President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s criticism of the autonomy of the Central Bank (BC). In a series of posts on Twitter, this Thursday (19), Padilha emphasized that “there is no pre-disposition on the part of the government to make any change in the relationship with the Central Bank”.
“As president Lula said, in his government experience, he gave full autonomy to the president of the Central Bank, Henrique Meirelles. The president is not going to change his posture now, even more so with a law that establishes rules in this sense”, he reinforced.
Yesterday (18), in an interview with the news channel Globonews, Lula said that the BC’s autonomy provided for by law is “silliness”. He also criticized the interest rate policy and inflation control.
“My disagreement is the following, in this country they fought a lot to have an independent Central Bank thinking that it would improve what? You know, I can tell you with my experience, it is silly to think that an independent Central Bank president will do more than the Central Bank did when the president [da República] is who indicated. I doubt that this Central Bank president [Roberto Campos Neto] be more independent than was the [Henrique] Meirelles. I doubt. Why, with the independent bank, is inflation the way it is? Is the interest the way it is?”, he questioned.
Lula defended that the inflation target should be higher than the current one, which, according to him, ends up forcing a greater squeeze on the economy. “Look, you set an inflation target of 3.7%. When you do that, you are forced to tighten the economy more in order to reach that 3.7%. Why did you need to do 3.7%? Why not?” make 4.5, as we did? What we need right now is the following, the Brazilian economy needs to grow again, and we need to distribute income, we need to do more social policy”.
Central Bank autonomy came into effect in February 2021, after being approved by the National Congress and sanctioned by the government. The main change of the Central Bank independence law is the adoption of 4-year terms for the president and directors of the federal autarchy. These mandates will occur in cycles that do not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic.
