By Jamie McGeever
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s record public debt pile rose further above 5 trillion reais in January, while rock-bottom interest rates continued to anchor the cost of servicing it near all-time lows, data showed on Wednesday.
Total federal debt rose 1% in January to 5.06 trillion reais ($932 billion), while the total domestic debt stock rose 1.2% to 4.82 trillion reais, Treasury said.
It said its liquidity cushion, essentially an emergency cash buffer, fell 8.6% in nominal terms from the previous month to 805.7 billion reais.
“It should be noted that this indicator may change significantly over the coming months, especially those with high volumes of debt maturing,” Treasury said.
According to Treasury figures, 605 billion reais of domestic federal debt comes due in the first four months of this year, with 283 billion needing to be rolled over in April alone, the most ever for a single month.
February has seen a recovery in global markets and improving risk sentiment toward emerging countries. But growing concerns about Brazil’s fiscal trajectory and reform agenda continue to sour sentiment toward it and push up longer-term rates, it added.
The average rate of interest on the domestic federal debt stock fell to a new low of 7.15% from 7.3%, but the average rate on new domestic debt issued in the 12 months to January inched up to 4.65% from a record low of 4.44%.
Treasury said that the average maturity on the domestic debt stock in January edged up to 3.41 years from a record low 3.39 in December, and the average on the overall federal debt stock rose to 3.61 years from 3.59.
($1 = 5.43 reais)
(Reporting by Jamie McGeever and Isabel Versiani; editing by John Stonestreet)
