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Ten years of the 2015 crisis: the zero that was not the end

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The extreme

A scale running from zero to one hundred hit zero. There was no lower reading possible for domestic fear — and even so, the worst of the cycle still lay ahead. That August, the three alarms of the house rang in unison: the exchange rate, the public debt and fiscal tension all broke through their own historical edges almost at the same instant. In numbers: the Perene Risk Index collapsed from 79.1 to 0.0, the absolute floor of the scale; the intermarket system shrank from 21.32 to 14.64; the dollar closed at R$ 3.5143 and the public debt reached 62.97% of GDP.

What happened next

The bottom of the scale was not the bottom of the fall. Three months later, in November, capital fled commodities in a hurry and ran toward what pays without depending on the economy turning — Utilities rose to the highest point of the reading, and the intermarket sank even further, from 20.65 to 12.19. The thaw only came in 2016, and it came strangely. In March, the banks leapt from one of the series' floors to neutrality in a single month, and the mood of the house surged to 95.5 — extreme optimism — while the risk structure barely cleared neutral. The real normalization only arrived in August 2016: the intermarket crossed to 50.14, neutral ground, with the dollar back at R$ 3.2097. A full year separated the scream from the silence.

What did not happen

The zero of August 2015 was not the bottom — November was worse. Nor did the recovery come by a leap of faith: when relative prices turned, in March 2016, it was the mood that screamed buy, not the economy, which remained defensive. The Selic did not budge to rescue anyone: it stayed pinned at 14.25% a year from the start to the end of the episode. And the dollar did not reverse right away — it went from R$ 3.51 to nearly R$ 3.98 before giving way, and only a year later returned to R$ 3.21.

The honest verdict

Ten years on, the lesson of the zero is the most uncomfortable the archive holds: the bottom of an indicator is not the bottom of the cycle. The scale marked its lowest possible number and the fall went on — because maximum aversion signals the beginning of a process, almost never the end of a descent. Normalization was not an instant. It was a year, read month by month.

Continue reading: The bottom that was not a bottom · The 2015 crisis against the 2016 bottom · The 2016 bottom — structure before mood →

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Characters: Flow (risk appetite) · Structure (intermarket) · Mood · Dollar