BRAZILIAN Finance Minister Nelson Barbosa failed to calm markets with promises of reform last week, as investors said erratic policy signals raised doubts over the left-leaning government’s ability to end the worst recession in decades in Latin America’s largest economy.

    Brazil’s currency, the real, fell Thursday to a record low against the dollar and long-term interest rate futures surged a day after the central bank surprised markets by holding its key interest rate steady at 14.25 percent. It had previously signaled a hike was needed to curb high inflation.

    The decision stoked concern among critics that President Dilma Rousseff had intervened to avert monetary tightening with the economy already on the ropes. Figures showed Thursday that Brazil lost 1.5 million payroll jobs last year, its worst annual result in nearly three decades.

    The number of employed people in Brazil fell 3.7 percent in 2015. That decline is comparable to job losses in the United States during the height of its financial crisis in the 12 months after September 2008.

    Barbosa, a leftist economist, said the crisis was temporary and that Brazil’s economy would adjust to global headwinds.

    “This is not the new normal. This is a transition phase for Brazil,” Barbosa said at a panel in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    The minister said previously that Brazil will seek to lower the cost of one of the world’s most generous pension systems and to simplify the tax code.

    The appointment of Barbosa to replace fiscal conservative Joaquim Levy at the Finance Ministry in December was considered by many as a clear shift in policy direction to try to rescue the once-booming economy.

    Since then, Rousseff, who faces impeachment proceedings in Congress, has sent mixed signals to investors with promises to press ahead with austerity to close a widening fiscal gap and fight inflation while at the same time bolstering credit.

    “We are lost because we are receiving mixed signals from a very weak government,” said Bruno Rovai, an economist with Barclays in New York. “The big concern is whether we will have this uncertainty until 2018 ... we may not have a recovery at all until we have a new government.”

    Brazil’s currency has weakened nearly 5 percent so far in January after losing 32 percent of its value against the greenback during 2015. The real closed 1.5 percent lower Thursday, at 4.1655 per dollar — its lowest closing level since the currency was created in 1994.(SD-Agencies)