Opinion – Marcos de Vasconcellos: Guedes fantasizes that Covid was defeated to praise his own work

“The disease has been conquered”, says Minister Paulo Guedes, dejected and reticent, in front of a computer that displays the latest news and quotations of assets from the financial market (Bloomberg terminal), in his office.

The speech appears in a video made by the Ministry of Economy to show the portfolio’s “Balance of Shares” in 2021, published on official government channels on December 22, but watched by less than 650 people so far (see below).

There, before Christmas, a quick search was enough to notice the increase in the number of Covid cases around the world, with its omicron variant, and understand the damage that was to come. The optimistic fantasy was the typical choice of those entering an election year.

In his annual report, the Minister of Economy guarantees that “the economy has returned in a V”, but Brazil has become poorer. It’s just that “the whole world has become poorer”, he justifies, with the rise in global inflation, reflecting the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With many pauses in his speech, Guedes brings few traces of the economist who said, emphatically, in 2018, that the governance to be built by Bolsonaro would have new bases. “It’s not the take there, it gives it here in Congress”, affirmed the energetic “Posto Ipiranga”, which seemed to have the answer for everything.

These and other predictions by Guedes from the time of the past elections have aged badly. The release of funds through parliamentary amendments on the eve of elections in Congress and the vote on the PEC of the Precatórios, show the imposition of reality on the discourse.

President Jair Bolsonaro, in fact, only deserved a quick quote in the balance sheet of Minister Guedes. It would have been thanks to the work of him and the team of ministers that the economy would have returned in a “V”, with the creation of more than three million jobs.

Guedes’ video is part of a series of assessments made by various agents of the Ministry of Economy, in which the secretaries of the different areas praise their work.

Some self-assessments border on fantasy. In the midst of the fiscal chaos that has sunk the value of the real and the stock exchange, with uncertainties about the government’s commitment to the spending ceiling and the release of funds by force, the special secretary of the Treasury and Budget, Esteves Colnago, says that ” 2021 is ending on a very good note in fiscal terms.”

Faced with the highest interest rates since 2017, with the prospect of rising even more next year, making money more expensive and making entrepreneurship difficult, the special secretary for Productivity and Competitiveness, Carlos Da Costa, says: “Brazil today is a very best to undertake, what we call the best business environment”.

The privatization secretary, Diogo Mac Cord, in turn, “2021 was an exceptional year”, with “fantastic deliveries”.

Among the “fantastic deliveries” listed by Mac Cord is the Provisional Measure for the privatization of Eletrobras. The sale of the state-owned company has been dragging on since the beginning of the government and experts believe that the chances of it being watered down are tremendous, since taking such a project forward in a year of presidential elections requires Herculean effort and negotiations.

Election years are no longer easy for investors, as I showed here last week. If the economic team prefers electoral self-congratulations instead of facing the reality that plagues our market, investing in the stock market this year will be like driving in a fog

See videos by Guedes, Colnago, Costa and Mac Cord here.