Brazil enters 2026 with a contrast between numbers and sentiment. Explain myself. The job market closed 2025 with the quarter ending in December, the lowest in the recent series. Inflation in December was 0.33% and the IPCA accumulated for the year was 4.26%. At the same time, activity lost traction: GDP grew just 0.1% in the third quarter compared to the previous quarter, and industrial production stagnated in November, falling 1.2% year-on-year. Still, the most telling sign appears in mood.
In the December 2025 AtlasIntel/Bloomberg survey, 47% of respondents classified Brazil’s economic situation as bad. When the question moves to the private sphere, the tone changes: 36% negatively assessed their own family situation and 42% did the same in relation to the job market. The country is perceived as worse than the home and worse than the job.
Furthermore, the design of the questionnaire allows us to separate the present and the future by measuring expectations for the next six months in three distinct dimensions: the country’s economy, the job market and the family’s financial situation. The pattern repeats itself. Pessimism focuses on the collective future, while individual expectations are less negative.
It was when reading a recent column by Tim Harford, in the Financial Times, that this pattern caught my attention again. Harford notes that we evaluate our own lives from direct experience, while we evaluate the country from information mediated by news, social media, and political conflict. They are different processes, with different biases. This helps to explain part of the Brazilian contrast, but is this asymmetry enough to explain the extent of the current pessimism?
In , Samuel Pessoa argues that the dominant economic discourse has returned to minimizing macroeconomic restrictions and treating the expansion of public spending as an almost automatic engine of growth, a pattern historically associated with unstable trajectories in Latin America. At the same time, he draws attention to the deterioration of the structural fiscal result documented by the Ministry of Finance’s own Economic Policy Secretariat, suggesting that the problem is not only in the political tone, but also in the underlying data.
Although the average citizen is naturally more negative in evaluating the country than life itself, they also react to this environment. The present may be supported by a buoyant job market and good results on time. However, the lack of clear coordination between fiscal policy, institutional signaling and growth strategy affects the way the future is perceived.
Brazil has already experienced episodes in which employment and consumption remained strong while fiscal credibility gradually deteriorated, until adjustment became inevitable. Given the recent drop in consumer confidence and worsening expectations, the question that remains is whether we are just facing another cycle of informational pessimism or whether, this time, the mood is already beginning to reflect a deeper understanding of the country’s lack of direction.
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