2022 vs 2015: two slow domestic contractions

Comparison

What rhymes

The end of 2022 and the year 2015 were, in the Radar's archive, two markets that contracted from inside the house — not from a scare arriving from outside. In December 2022, the entire structure shrank in on itself: the intermarket ended the month practically at zero, at the floor of the scale (from 39.8 to 0.17), mood pulled back to 30.4, and capital abandoned the cycle for defense. 2015 had the same shape — a domestic tension, then fiscal in nature, that kept tightening the structure through the year. In both, the origin of the stress was internal, and the fear set in slowly.

What differs

The named cause and the calendar of relief. 2022 closed an election year, with the Selic pinned at 13.75% imposing a high opportunity cost on any risk asset; 2015 turned on fiscal disarray. But what most separates the two is not the reason — it's that both took about a year to exit, and exited by their own paths, full of mismatches between mood and prices. A domestic contraction does not carry the short shelf life of an external panic.

What didn't happen

Neither resolved the way the photo of the floor suggested. The darkness of December 2022 did not set off an immediate rebound: it was the staging of a turn that would only complete twelve months later, after a full year of discord in 2023. 2015 did not turn at the snap of the alarm either. Anyone reading either floor as "it has already passed" would have crossed months of defense, pullbacks, and false starts — because the contraction was the setting, not the instant of the turn.

Honest verdict

Both 2022 and 2015 show a pattern different from the acute scare: fear of domestic origin enters slowly and takes about a year to leave. Some fears arrive from outside and pass; others are born at home and take a year to leave.

Continue the story: The house in the dark (2022 election) · The three alarms of August 2015 · COVID vs the 2022 election →

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Characters: Structure (intermarket) · Mood · Cyclicals × defensives · Rates (Selic)