The Gisele Indicator strikes again

An old financial journalism joke goes, “Two makes a trend,” so let’s just go ahead and name Gisele Bündchen the worst FX metric of all time.

The appearance of the supermodel in a four-page New York advertising spread along with FTX's slightly less photogenic Sam Bankman-Fried naturally caused some hilarity online today given the crypto meltdown currently unfolding.

She also appeared at FTX's Bahamas Bragathon earlier this year, alongside her laser-eyed Bitcoin brother-husband Tom Brady and two 1990s politicians named William Clinton and Anthony Blair.NaturallyThe power couple (Bündchen and Brady, not Clinton and Blair) also has an NFT platform.

FT Alphaville doesn't know whether Bündchen was paid for the FTX endorsement in traditional fiat or crypto, but given her track record, we'll bet on the latter. Regardless, the timing of the ad is amazing.

Back in November 2007, Bündchen's sister Patricia told Bloomberg that from now on the supermodel would prefer to be paid in euros "because we don't know what will happen to the dollar." BrazilVejaThe magazine reported that at least Pantene had complied.

The story ran everywhere (including FTAV). Even the WSJ railed against the diss on its editorial pages and used it as an excuse to bash the Fed.Plus ca change. But it turns out that Bündchen ticked the euro almost perfectly:

To be fair, both modelers and models have had difficulty dealing with the volatility of currencies, an area so difficult to predict that sell-side analysts often joke that God invented foreign exchange strategists to make economists appear accurate.

Perhaps Bündchen's ultimate goal is to make foreign exchange strategists feel better?