5 Reais 1st. Family, Watermark 'Effigy'

The Real launched in July 1994 as Brazil's seventh currency in under a decade — the government's ultimately successful attempt to kill hyperinflation that had peaked above 2,700% annually. This first-family 5 Reais captures the extraordinary institutional turbulence of that stabilization period: the note passed through four different Finance Ministers in roughly a year, each change recorded in the printed signatures. Fernando Henrique Cardoso signed as Finance Minister on the earliest series before winning the presidency in October 1994.

The phrase "Deus Seja Louvado" — God Be Praised — was added mid-run starting at series A1610A, a theistic inscription that had appeared on cruzado and cruzeiro notes before it and remains on Brazilian currency to this day. Its absence on earlier series of this note is the quickest way to place a specimen within the print sequence. The B-suffix series (A0001B–A1000B) were printed exclusively by Giesecke & Devrient in Munich, not Leipzig — a distinction the catalog data conflates but the notes themselves do not.