LatinNews Daily - 25 April 2023

* Brazil’s central bank (BCB) has released the latest edition of its Focus bulletin, a weekly survey of private sector economists and analysts, which predicted that the country’s annual GDP for 2023 would grow by 0.96% compared to 2022. This was up from 0.90% annual growth predicted in the previous Focus bulletin, published on 17 April. This week’s bulletin also predicted that the country’s consumer price index (IPCA) would be 6.04% by the end of this year, a slightly higher annual inflation forecast compared to the previous bulletin’s prediction of 6.01%. The slight increase in the BCB’s annual GDP forecast comes despite the Brazilian government’s continued criticisms of the central bank’s decision to maintain a high benchmark interest rate of 13.75%, which it states is incompatible with economic growth, criticisms which Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva repeated during his state visit to Portugal, in a speech at the Fórum Empresarial Portugal-Brasil business conference on 24 April.