The Evolution of Brazil’s Banking System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo S. Cortes ◽  
Renato L. Marcondes
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Fiscal Crisis ◽  
Foreign Banks ◽  
Recent Period ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
System P ◽  
The Military

This chapter analyzes the origins and development of the Brazilian banking system from colonial times to the present day. It begins with a description of the first credit relationships before the existence of banks in colonial Brazil, followed by a discussion of the difficulties faced by the first banks established in the imperial period. It then presents a detailed discussion of domestic and foreign banks during the First Republican, and the key institutional changes that occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the military regime after 1964. Later, it covers banking activities in the hyperinflation period up to the country’s stabilization in 1994. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the recent period and how the banking system endured the Great Recession of 2008–2010 and the recent Brazilian fiscal crisis that began in 2014.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Boom And Bust ◽  
Investment Advisers ◽  
Boom And Bust Cycles ◽  
The U.S

Universal banks arose in the U.S. during two periods in the past century—the 1920s and the late 1990s. On both occasions, universal banks in the U.S. and Europe promoted intense boom-and-bust cycles that led to global calamities—the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–09. Universal banks received extensive bailouts on both sides of the Atlantic during both crises. Three core features of universal banks cause them to generate destructive boom-and-bust cycles. First, pervasive conflicts of interest prevent them from acting as objective lenders or as impartial investment advisers. Second, bonus-driven cultures encourage their insiders to take speculative risks to produce short-term profits. Third, their ability to convert loans into asset-backed securities allows them to package risky loans into securities sold as purportedly “safe” investments to poorly informed investors. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 broke up universal banks and established structural buffers that prevented spillovers of risk between the banking system and other financial sectors. The U.S. avoided systemic financial crises after World War II until Glass-Steagall was undermined by regulators and ultimately repealed by Congress. Congress failed to adopt similar structural reforms after the Great Recession. As a result, universal banks continue to dominate our financial markets and pose unacceptable systemic dangers. We urgently need a new Glass-Steagall Act to break up universal banks again and restore a more stable and resilient financial system.

Financial Crises and the Public Discourse on Financial Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Twentieth

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.

The Great Depression and the Great Recession in Interwar Greece and Today: A comparison

2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Lazaretou
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek Crisis ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Nominal Anchor

AbstractThe past Greek crisis experience is more or less terra incognita. In all historical empirical studies Greece is systematically neglected or included only sporadically in their cross-country samples. In the national literature too there is little on this topic. In this paper we use the 1930s crisis as a useful testing ground to compare the two crises episodes, ‘then’ and ‘now’; to detect differences and similarities and discuss the policy facts with the ultimate aim to draw some ‘policy lessons’ from history. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the Greek crisis experience across the two historical episodes. Comparisons with the interwar period show that the recent economic downturn was faster, larger and more severe than during the early 1930s. More importantly, analysing the determinants of the two crises, we conclude that Greece’s problems arose from its inability to credibly adhere to a nominal anchor.

scholarly journals War 2008 das neue 1929? Richtige und falsche Vergleiche zwischen der Großen Depression der 1930er Jahre und der Großen Rezession von 2008

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (Supplement) ◽  
pp. 36-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Ritschl
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Political Response ◽  
Fast Spreading

AbstractThe Great Recession of 2008 hit the international economy harder than any other peacetime recession since the Great Contraction after 1929. Soon enough, analogies with the Great Depression were presented, and conclusions were drawn regarding the political response to the slump. This paper is an attempt to sort out real and false analogies and to present conclusions for policy. Its main hypothesis is that the Great Recession resembles the final phase of the Great Contraction between 1931 and 1933, characterized by a fast spreading global financial crisis and the breakdown of the international Gold Standard. The same is also true of the political responses to the banking problems occurring in both crises. The analogy seems less robust for the initial phase of the Great Depression after 1929. The monetary policy response to the Great Recession largely seems to be informed by the monetary interpretation of the Great Depression, but less so by the lessons from the interwar financial crises. As in the Great Depression, policy appears to be on a learning curve, moving away from a mostly monetary response toward mitigating counterpart risk and minimizing interbank contagion.

Comment on “The Great Depression”

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-129
Author(s):  
Eloi Laurent
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Push Forward

Put together, my remarks constitute an unsubtle attempt at rendering explicit the elegant implicit comparisons between the Great Depression and today’s “Great recession” that make Alan Brinkley’s article an insightful delight for the reader. At the end of his paper, Brinkley points out to some similarities between the two crises. In the brief following comment, I will push forward his conclusion but on a somewhat different path: in my view, if the consequences of the Great Depression and the “Great Recession” have so far been quite different, their causes appear to be in many respects alike, or at least parallel.

Social class and mental health

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
M. Harvey Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Psychological Disorder ◽  
Mental Health Crisis ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Income Loss ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression

The Great Depression saw increasingly higher rates of mental disorder at successively lower social class levels. These findings have been repeated over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dynamic interpretations of these relations have concentrated on vulnerability to economic crises, resulting in major increases in mental hospitalization and suicide. These studies have shown psychological morbidity and suicide to be strongly influenced by employment and income loss. Did the Great Recession re-enact the Great Depression’s mental health crisis for world societies? Recent literature shows substantially elevated psychological disorder in the Great Recession across industrialized societies. New multivariate analyses, using gross domestic product declines and unemployment increases as the main recessional indicators, find that world suicide and industrialized country overall mortality rates increased owing to the Great Recession and government austerity. A paradigm is presented of the circular relations linking economic crises, social class, and the interactive relations of mental and physical health.

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