Euclides Mance
July 20, 2025
Who could have made a profit of between R$ 420 million and R$ 560 million in a single afternoon, speculating against the Brazilian currency on July 9, when Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff hike on imports from Brazil?
Perhaps Brazilian authorities ought to investigate this apparently anomalous activity in the foreign exchange market — and look into whether Eduardo Bolsonaro, who received R$ 2 million transferred by his father, had prior knowledge of the measures announced by Trump and celebrated by him and his family.
After all, using privileged information to gain advantage in the financial market — known as insider trading — is a crime both in the United States and in Brazil.
The math is simple. It is estimated that those who carried out the operation moved between 3 and 4 billion dollars, buying U.S. currency at R$ 5.46 and selling it three hours later at R$ 5.60. The profit per dollar would be R$ 0.14, resulting in a total estimated profit between R$ 420 million and R$ 560 million from that operation. In short, a gain of around half a billion reais in just 3 hours.
The charts below, depicting the atypical surge beginning with the purchase of dollars at 1:30 p.m. and ending with their sale at 4:30 p.m., seem to indicate that some speculator had early access to Trump’s announcement and profited hundreds of millions of reais within a few hours using that information.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egfMd2kWIGQ
Source: https://www.x-rates.com/graph/?from=USD&to=BRL&amount=1
Meanwhile, there are still naïve Brazilians who believe that Trump’s measures against the Brazilian economy are meant to save Brazil from communism.
(Translated by AI. Original in Portuguese: euclidesmance.net/wp/index.php/2025/07/21/)