Finance Ministry working on debt relief program

Brazil's Finance Minister Dario Durigan is set to meet the chief executives of the country's largest banks in São Paulo today, in what officials describe as the final round of haggling before the Lula administration unveils its flagship household debt relief package on May 1. 

The expected Labor Day rollout is no coincidence: the government wants the optics of standing with workers whose paychecks, despite a tight labor market, are vanishing before the month is out.

The program is being treated as a continuation of the original 2023 debt renegotiation scheme — when the government helped millions of people to refinance their liabilities. According to what administration officials have said off the record, the new program is meant to refinance somewhere between BRL 20 billion and 30 billion (roughly USD 4 billion to 6 billion) in delinquent personal debt, drawn from a pool of overdue credit estimated at BRL 70 billion to 100 billion.