The desk's own note published on 20 August 2026 argued that WIG-BANKI's advance, up 2.27% on 19 August and 2.26% over five sessions, was pricing further NBP easing that the March projection round, expected to worsen when the July update lands, does not yet support. That thesis stands. Nothing in the fresh data settles it either way, since the July projection has still not published. But the tape now hands the desk a second variable that the bank-sector framing alone cannot absorb.
EUR/USD rose 0.94% on the day to 1.1688, a fresh 20-day high, while USD/PLN fell 1.0% to its own 20-day low of 3.694. That is the dollar leg doing the work, not the złoty specifically strengthening against the euro: EUR/PLN itself was essentially flat, down 0.07% to 4.3163, sitting mid-range against its 20-day band of 4.2945 to 4.3303. A broad dollar move that lifts every EUR-quoted currency and every dollar-funded Polish asset at once is a different animal from a domestic rate call, and it does not carry the same information about where the NBP goes next.
A rally that a weaker dollar and a rate-cut bet can both explain equally well is not evidence for either one.
That ambiguity matters because WIG20's broader move split unevenly across the index. WIG-BANKI's 2.27% gain outpaced the WIG20's 1.72%. Mid- and small-caps, more insulated from the dollar-funding channel and from rate expectations alike, told a flatter story: MWIG40 was down 1.15% over the same five sessions into 19 August even as WIG20 rose 0.48% over that span. If the dollar move were the whole story, breadth should have been more even. The bank-heavy skew survives, which keeps the desk's own prior reading alive rather than replaced.
Poland's July HICP inflation printed at 3.1% year on year, per Eurostat, against the NBP's 2.5% target and its 3.5% upper tolerance band; the reference rate has held at 3.75% since the 5 March cut. Nothing in that print, or in the fiscal noise around the government's proposed PIT threshold changes drawing criticism from Confederation leader Sławomir Mentzen, changes the NBP calculus banks are betting on. The projection test the desk flagged on 20 August remains the one that settles this, and it remains unpublished.
The verdict splits, then. The currency tailwind is real and adds a second, independent driver to Wednesday's advance that the desk's rate-cut framing did not originally price in. The bank-sector premise itself is untouched, neither confirmed nor undermined by anything published since. What would change the read is the NBP's coming July projection round. If it holds the March round's mid-2027 return-to-target path despite the fuel-cap expiry and supply-shock complications, the rally's rate-cut premise gets its confirmation. If it pushes the date to 2027 Q4 or later, the bank-sector leg of Wednesday's gain looks overdone regardless of what the dollar did.
