Suchergebnisse

Sem dúvida, os investimentos estrangeiros tecnicamente não fazem parte do sistema financeiro. Eles não constituem uma instituição, e nem atuam como intermediários. Contudo, é certamente impossível discutir os sistemas financeiros latino-americanos, nesse ou em qualquer outro período, sem levar em conta os investimentos estrangeiros. Ao mesmo tempo, estudos sobre os investimentos estrangeiros, que não analisam o impacto desses fluxos nos sistemas financeiros nacionais da América Latina e na própria natureza das transformações capitalistas nesses países constituem, no fim das contas, pouco mais do que glorificados exercícios de contabilidade ou meditações ahistóricas neoclássicas, sem menosprezar o valor intrínseco das quantificações e das meditações em geral.No mundo do pré-Guerra, os empréstimos externos para a América Latina representavam apenas uma parte do complexo de forças externas que contribuíram para moldar seus sistemas financeiros e seu desenvolvimento capitalista. Bancos comerciais, bancos de investimentos e companhias de seguros estrangeiras foram as mais óbvias manifestações institucionais dessa relação. As políticas fiscais e monetárias dos governos foram também fortemente influenciadas por forças externas - por exemplo, pelos empréstimos externos e pela arrecadação fiscal proveniente dos impostos sobre as importações. Por sua vez, a política oficial desempenhou o principal papel na formação e no funcionamento dos sistemas financeiros nacionais na América Latina, especialmente porque as necessidades fiscais dos governos eram da maior importância na relação entre o Estado e o setor bancário.

During the inter-war period the international economy was drastically altered as economic nationalism and the desire for self-sufficiency were strengthened in the aftermath of the Great War. Even Britain, the bastion of free trade, began to adopt protection and trade preference from 1919. The narrowing of European markets had serious consequences for primary commodity producers, many of whom, induced by high war-time prices, had greatly increased their output and used windfall profits to install more modern processes and increase capacity. When commodity prices began to fall from about the mid-1920s, the most common response was to raise output, and this simply helped to push prices still lower. With the Crash in 1929, the position of primary producers changed from bad to catastrophic. Prices collapsed, flows of capital and credit dried up and the already weakened international economy broke into fragments. Countries moved to protect themselves by the introduction of exchange controls, systems of trade preference, higher tariffs and bi-lateral trade agreements. In Latin America the most widely known bi-lateral arrangement was the so-called Roca-Runciman Agreement celebrated between Britain and Argentina in 1933 and renewed three years later.

The collapse of this economy in August 1914 and its subsequent restructuring, therefore, created extremely testing conditions for peripheral countries. These conditions and the way in which they were dealt with help to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the variants of the primary-export-based capitalist development which had taken root here. Also, as had happened in Europe, the war witnessed far-reaching political and social changes in the region, associated in the main with the emergence of a more vocal urban middle class and a more combative working class. By considering within a fully comparative perspective some of the main elements of both economic and socio-political change in four major Latin American countries during the war years, this study provides many important new insights into the nature and limitations of pre-war growth as well as the significance of the many changes brought by the war