Brazilian exchange rate complexity: Financial crisis effects

With the financial market globalization, foreign investments became vital for the economies, mainly in emerging countries. In the last decades, Brazilian exchange rates appeared as a good indicator to measure either investors’ confidence or risk aversion. Here, some events of global or national financial crisis are analyzed, trying to understand how they influenced the “dollar-real” rate evolution. The theoretical tool to be used is the López–Mancini–Calbet (LMC) complexity measure that, applied to real exchange rate data, has shown good fitness between critical events and measured patterns.

► López—Mancini–Calbet (LMC) measure is applied to economic data to detect critical events.
► LMC measure is calculated considering Brazilian exchange rate, from 1999 to 2010.
► LMC measure is a robust tool to associate critical events to exchange rates.