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Money has never been so expensive. The mood, never so high.

Article

The extreme

A market that feels invincible usually has cheap money behind it — so the easy theory teaches. Yet the month the Brazilian market came closest to that feeling was also the one in which credit cost the most across the entire span. Mood had been climbing for months, without the price of money loosening by a single cent, and at the top of the climb it hit the ceiling of the scale. Nothing in the cost of credit explained the party. In numbers: in June 2025 market mood closed at 92.3, up from 84.7 the month before and from just 40.8 three months earlier — extreme optimism, the reading of a market that feels close to invincible — with the Selic pinned at 15.0% a year and the dollar at R$ 5.55.

What rhymes

Five years earlier, the perfect mirror. In the shock that accelerated everything, when domestic fear stopped being mood and turned into liquidation, the Banco Central cut the Selic to 3.75% a year — credit suddenly cheap — and free money did not buy a single buyer. Mood, measured on the same Ânima, scraped the floor: it fell from 4.1 to 2.6, extreme pessimism. The Perene Risk Index moved from 0.0 to 10.6, but on the way out of risk, not on a return of appetite. The dollar closed at R$ 4.8839, flagged as a statistical anomaly. Rates on the floor, fear at the bottom — and the same defiance of theory, only from the opposite end.

What did not happen

In neither month did the price of money command the mood. Rates at the 2025 ceiling did not contain the euphoria; rates at the 2020 floor did not dispel the fear. Anyone reading the board by the rate — dear money cools, cheap money cheers — would be reading the wrong variable at both ends. And there is a symmetry that dismantles the simple version for good: in 2025, under peak mood, the intermarket structure remained in hard risk-off, with a score of 22.19; in 2020, under trough mood, the broad structure still registered risk-on at 56.8. In both crossings, the internal axes disagreed among themselves — and the rate tipped the scale in neither.

The honest verdict

The cost of money traveled both extremes of its recent history — 15.0% one month, 3.75% the other — and, at both ends, mood ignored the rate table. The highest euphoria of the series was not born of cheap money; the deepest fear did not come from dear money. Honesty asks for limits: comparing a month of celebration with a month of panic of distinct natures explains less than it seems, and March 2020 closed without the stability that would allow the regime to be classified with confidence. What remains is the coincidence, not the cause. The sense of invincibility needed no cheap money to appear — and cheap money, when it was missing, did not buy it.

Continue the story: Two years of high rates · The carry that became gravity →

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Characters: Mood · Rates (Selic)