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The tightening came with euphoria. The relief, in silence.

Article

The extreme

After a year of rates held high, the relief arrived — and almost no one seemed to notice. The first cut, the gesture the market usually greets with a euphoric session, came as if asking permission. In numbers: the Selic eased to 14.75% a year, the first move below the 15.0% that framed December, January and February, while the mood of the exchange barely stirred, from 60.1 to 60.6 — a third month pinned to the neutral zone. The domestic regime stayed defensive, at 33.6. The cut came; the floor shrugged.

What rhymes

Rewind exactly one year and you find the opposite gesture received back to front. It was the year of euphoria under double-digit rates: the Selic climbed one more rung of the tightening, to 14.25% a year, the kind of gesture that usually weighs on spirits. The floor cheered. Mood jumped from 40.8 to 77.5, printing extreme optimism, and risk appetite nearly doubled, from 31.2 to 73.7, in outright risk-on. Rates still rising; sentiment at the ceiling of joy.

What did not happen

The easy reading wants the tightening to frighten and the relief to cheer. Neither held. The hike came wrapped in euphoria; the first cut, in a whisper. Beneath the opposite moods, what moved least was what was most expected to turn: the defensive domestic regime — 32.5 when rates were still rising, 33.6 when they began to yield. Rates traveled the whole arc and made their first about-face at 14.75%; the country's structural reading barely advanced a point. The cut did not dissolve the defense; the euphoria did not wait for the cut to appear.

The honest verdict

The plateau of high rates was not an event, it was a season. The Radar recorded the climb with a bang and the start of the descent as a discreet breath — and what repeats is not the direction of rates, it is the stubbornness of the defensive, which crossed the year almost without moving. Rates moved; the defense did not. The Radar measures that mismatch and stamps it, without decreeing which end inherits the following month. The relief came without fanfare; the foundation did not even react.

Continue the story: Two years of high rates · The highest euphoria under the highest rate →

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Characters: Rates (Selic) · Flow (risk appetite)