Photograph illustration present payments of US {dollars} and Brazilian Reais on December 19, 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Buda Mendes | Getty Photographs
Brazil’s finance minister rejected on Monday a report saying the nation was planning to impose taxes on U.S. tech firms if President Donald Trump proceeds with plans to introduce a 25% tariff on all U.S. metal imports.
“The data shouldn’t be right,” Fernando Haddad wrote on social media, after the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration was mulling tariffs on large tech companies as retaliation.
The South American nation is likely one of the largest sources of U.S. metal imports in addition to a prime market for a lot of large tech firms.
Trump stated on Sunday he would introduce on Monday new 25% tariffs on metal and aluminum imports, on prime of current metals duties, in one other escalation of his commerce coverage shakeup.
“The Brazilian authorities has made the wise determination to solely make statements on the acceptable time and based mostly on concrete selections, not on bulletins that could possibly be misinterpreted or revised,” Haddad stated.
In keeping with the Folha report, which cited an unnamed Brazilian authority, a possible Brazilian levy may have affected Amazon, Meta Platforms’ Fb and Instagram, and Alphabet-owned Google.
A finance ministry official in 2024 had already floated the thought of a possible tax on large tech firms to satisfy fiscal targets in case there was a authorities income shortfall this 12 months.