Carla Subirana

speaker

99 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Sep

Carla Subirana’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Working memory: the surprising decline of dementia · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

When I started reporting on this story and I contacted Brazilians, they just kept sending me memes and pictures of T-shirts showing their support to the payment system because it's sort of become a source of national pride for Brazilians.

So it's quite surprising to see something as unassuming as a payment system come under fire from Donald Trump's tariff regime.

So PIX is Brazil's instant digital payment system, which was created by the country's central bank.

And basically it lets people send money to each other instantly, 24 hours a day and completely free in most cases.

You just need a phone and a QR code.

And it has been a huge success.

Around 80% of Brazilians use it.

And it accounts for more than half of all payment transactions in the country.

So for millions of people, like paying with PIX has sort of become as normal as using cash once was.

PIX basically filled a hole and solved the problem that the private sector hadn't.

Because before PIX, electronic payments often came with fees, which meant that many poorer Brazilians relied on cash because digital payments were too expensive.

So the central bank estimates that around 70 million people have entered the formal financial system since PIX was launched.

So it's had sort of a democratizing effect across the payments ecosystem.

Well, the Trump administration spent a year investigating Brazil's trade practices, and it concluded that some of them were unfair to American businesses.

And so recently it announced a 25% tariff on a range of Brazilian imports, and PIX ended up on that list.

And the case against PIX, it basically rests on two assumptions.

The first is that it damages American payment companies, basically Visa and MasterCard.

And the second is that it's a protectionist tool.

So basically, because it is operated and regulated by Brazil's central bank, the Trump administration says that the government is giving its own payment system an unfair advantage over other private competitors.

Well, so what I think is that some of the complaints about Brazil's trade policies do have a point.

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