LatinNews Monitor: Brazil & Southern Cone - 08 January 2016

In an editorial published in the Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo on New Year’s Day, President Dilma Rousseff acknowledged that 2015 had been “a very hard year”. She expressed confidence, however, that Brazil would end 2016 in much better shape than most analysts predict. So far, however, there is little to justify that optimism. The weekly survey of 100 economists by the central bank found a majority predicting that Brazil would suffer its worst recession since 1901, with GDP growth for last year coming in at -3.71% and -2.95% in 2016. On some estimates, by the end of 2016, the Brazilian economy is expected to be 8% smaller than it was at the beginning of 2014.