Nelson Barbosa could, of course, turn out to be the man who fixes Brazil’s finances, tames soaring inflation and revives the sinking economy, but investors sure aren’t betting on it. As word spread across Sao Paulo trading floors Friday that Barbosa would be the country’s next finance minister, replacing the beleaguered Joaquim Levy, markets plunged. By day’s end, the currency was down 2.6 percent, stocks 3 percent. (Markets were little changed early Monday, with the currency swinging between positive and negative territories.) That harsh reception is the exact opposite of the broad rally that greeted Levy when he took the post a year earlier. Levy, though, was the market’s golden boy, with his University of Chicago-training, asset-manager experience and reputation as a fierce budget cutter. Barbosa, while generally respected by analysts for his technocratic skills, isn’t seen as being quite as tight-fisted on spending, a perception he only reinforced when suggesting Friday that he was amenable to granting subsidies to some industries. What’s more, the crisis that Barbosa will step into when he’s officially sworn in Monday is markedly more severe than it was a year ago. The economy is now shrinking at a 7 percent annual pace; the budget deficit has swelled to the widest in at least two decades; the country’s investment-grade rating is gone; Congress is bogged down in impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff; and the greatest corruption scandal the country has ever known is showing little sign of abating. If Levy couldn’t stem the crisis when it was more manageable before, what reason is there to believe Barbosa will now? “I don’t see that he has more political acumen or technical skill to do a better job,” said John Welch, a strategist at CIBC World Markets and long-time Brazil watcher. This year’s fiscal deterioration, Welch said, was in part the result of a plan to loosen targets that Barbosa helped establish years earlier. It’s “a flawed strategy because you need to have pressure on the politicians to adjust,” Welch said. Barbosa will address investor concerns in a conference call scheduled for noon Brasilia time, before being sworn in as finance minister later in the day. Markets Sank Like Levy, Barbosa served in the government during the economic boom years overseen by Rousseff’s predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Levy was treasurer while Barbosa worked his way up to deputy finance minister. When Rousseff asked Levy to return to Brasilia after the country’s commodity exports sank and the economy stagnated, Barbosa followed him, settling in a few blocks down in Brasilia’s government quarter as planning minister. Levy struggled almost from the outset, though, to reverse the widening budget gap. With legislators focused on the corruption scandal—which began at state-run oil giant Petrobras and has landed numerous executives and politicians in jail—little attention was paid to Levy’s pleas to cut spending. His relentless push in Congress to curtail labor and pension benefits earned him scorn from many members of the ruling Workers’ Party, which traditionally championed a robust social safety net. Even some business leaders started to express concern that Levy’s struggles to shore up fiscal accounts were blinding him to the need to stimulate growth. As the country’s finances worsened and the economy slipped deeper into recession, markets sank month after month. The currency is down 33 percent against the dollar this year. Prices on the government’s 10-year bonds have dropped to 82 cents on the dollar from 99 cents when Levy took office back in January. Their yield has climbed to almost 7 percent. The task of negotiating with Congress now falls to Barbosa, a 46-year-old economist who studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and started his career as a civil servant at the central bank in the mid-1990s. Workers’ Party leader Rui Falcao gave Barbosa a ringing endorsement Friday, calling him “very competent, able and good at dialogue.” While he may be closer to Rousseff’s party leaders than Levy was, analysts question whether he has the relationships with other factions of Congress to get much done. “Barbosa doesn’t necessarily have better political connections with other parties,” said Cristiano Noronha, vice president of Arko Advice, a Brasilia-based political consulting firm. The presidential and Finance Ministry press offices didn’t respond to e-mails sent outside normal business hours seeking comment. The strength of the minister’s ties may get tested quickly. At a press conference late Friday during which he pledged to continue the government’s push to tame the deficit, Barbosa said he’d try to push through plans to simplify taxes and cap pension spending. He said in an interview with Estadao newspaper over the weekend that he would win approval by May of a tax on banking transactions. Those are proposals that Levy never managed to get Congress to support.