5 - The Export Economy: Banking, Credit, and Currency

Summary

Business interest group activities and advice to government had a particularly strong influence on banking, credit, and currency. Enrolling most of Brazil's bankers, many of them in positions of leadership, the groups were a prime source of knowledge on such complex matters. Problems of banking, credit, and currency threatened Brazil's economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century. The most crucial was inexpensive credit for agriculture. Without it planters could not modernize their operations, as business interest groups urged, or in some cases even survive. Commerce itself also suffered from expensive credit and from periodic shortages of currency, which lifted interest rates and made ordinary business transactions difficult.

Shortages of credit and currency were interrelated. They were in large part attributable to the underdevelopment of Brazil's banking system and to a lesser extent to a flawed monetary policy. Business interest groups worked hard to ameliorate both. Unfortunately, there often was no agreement among them on how best to do it. Differences of opinion appeared between the Commercial Association of Rio de Janeiro and the rest of Brazil's commercial associations, between overseas merchants and factors, between businessmen and planters, and finally, between Northeast and Southeast. For the elites who controlled Brazil's export economy, questions of banking, credit, and currency proved unusually divisive.

Interest rates reflected the scarcity of credit. Like much else connected with the export economy, they were a worse problem in the Northeast and North than in the Southeast.