Steady slog toward investment grade.

Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ended his first year in office with some economic fireworks. Congress approved an historic tax reform, the country got an upgrade from credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P), and the stock market rallied to a record high. Were it up to the will of Lula's economic team, he could well recover the investment grade status Brazil lost under his protégée and successor Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) back in December 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]