"This Is Our Stupid Dad": A Currency Analyst Goes Viral In Brazil

Each bullish tweet he posts on the real is immediately greeted with thousands of likes and scores of "in bald guy we trust" responses

Robin Brooks speaks in the sober monotones of a Ph.D economist who's dedicated much of his career to calibrating fair-value models for foreign-exchange rates. We're within 5% of our $/BRL 4.50 fair value for the Brazilian Real, which is the closest we've been since March 2020, i.e. since before the COVID pandemic began. Closing the final gap will be harder. US real yields are rising rapidly, which is weighing on all EM currencies... pic.twitter.com/Y6mH2LkqTT

So it was a bit of a shock to Brooks, and his family, when he suddenly became a social media sensation in Brazil. But Brooks is a rarity in financial circles here: a long-term bull on the Brazilian real. And it is this unflinching optimism, even in the worst moments of Brazil's pandemic collapse, that has now made him the public face of the breakneck rally that's turned the real into the world's top-performing currency this year.

To his Twitter followers in Brazil, where exchange-rate-watching is something of a national obsession, Brooks, 51, is simply "the bald guy" -- "o careca" in Portuguese. Or sometimes "the bald guy from Goldman." He actually hasn't worked at Goldman Sachs in five years but, anyways, this has a much better ring to it than the "bald guy from the Institute of International Finance," where he currently serves as chief economist in Washington.

Each bullish tweet he posts on the real is immediately greeted with thousands of likes and scores of "in bald guy we trust" responses that have become something of a hallmark of his followers. The more zealous in the crowd tweet photo-shopped pictures depicting him as a boxer or GIFs lauding him as "the man, the myth, the legend."