Currency Analyst Goes Viral In Brazil As His Kids Refer Him As Their Stupid Dad

New Delhi: A currency analyst has been becoming viral in Brazil not just for his works but for his kids who referred to him as their ''stupid dad''.

The analyst identified as Robin Brooks who is a chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) and has dedicated much of his career to calibrating fair-value models for foreign exchange rates, as per the Bloomberg report.

As per the report, it was a shock for Brooks and his family, when he suddenly became a social media sensation in Brazil. But Brooks is a rarity in financial circles here: the long-term bull in the Brazilian real. And this irresistible optimism, even in the worst moment of Brazil's epidemic collapse, has now made him the universal face of the catastrophic rally that has turned reality into the world's top-performing currency this year.

Each tweet garnered thousands of likes and scores of ''in a 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."

However, according to Brooks, his family believes that he is flabbergasted by his new stardom as his kids say 'What the hell? This is our stupid dad."

In a similar way, some of his critics describe his analysis too.

''They chuckle at how his fair-value forecast for the real -- 4.5 per dollar -- hasn't budged in over two years despite all sorts of major twists and turns in the local economy and global markets,'' the report said.

And they say his bullish call has somewhat randomly had the good fortune of picking up two major forces driving the currency's gains: A wave of aggressive interest-rate hikes by the central bank and a sudden boom in global demand for Brazil's exports of soybeans, oil, iron ore, and coffee.

"I keep talking about undervaluation, undervaluation, undervaluation," says Brooks. Shortly after he first released his bullish call, the pandemic hit, and investors began yanking money out of Brazil at such an alarmingly fast rate that he says he thought "the computer feed was broken." Those outflows, Brooks says, along with the scathing criticism he was seeing Brazilians heap on their political leaders on Twitter, emboldened him. "Usually to me, that's a good sign that, OK, this is overdone. Maybe there's real value and the Brazilian real is too cheap."

Brooks actually tweets mostly nowadays about the war in Ukraine and about how sanctions are failing to truly squeeze Russia's finances. Those tweets, though, typically garner a lot less attention than when he boasts about his Brazil call.

As per the Bloomberg report, Brook is Born and raised in Germany, he studied at the London School of Economics and Yale University before going on to work at the International Monetary Fund, Brevan Howard, and Goldman Sachs, where he was the firm's top foreign-exchange strategist.

It was during his time at the IMF that he helped create a fair-value currencies model that he uses to this day. He's just tinkered with it a little to feed in some high-frequency data.

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