Brazil’s private banks go back to the future

The echoes of 2014 have been loud in Brazil’s private banking industry over the past 12 months. A precipitous fall in interest rates – followed by a meteoric rise – has left the market completely the same but also very different.

The problem with paradigm shifts is that they have to stick. For Brazil’s private banks, the once-in-a-generation transition away from high-yielding fixed income products didn’t last.

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The country’s base rate (Selic) is now back to 13.75% and all those allocations into risk assets that accompanied its precipitous fall from 14.25% at the end of 2016 to 2% in 2020 are now a distant memory – a cyclical aberration rather than a structural realignment.

The fact that Brazil’s conversion to a low interest rate economy was a mirage is important.

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