Anne G. Hanley

Bancos na transição republicana em São Paulo: o financiamento hipotecário (1888-1901)

The republican transition introduced great changes to the Brazilian and especially Sao Paulo economy, through abolition of slavery, immigration promotion programs, coffee boom and monetary reforms. At this moment, the city of Sao Paulo became a great center of these changes. The banking institutions consisted of important agents in the financial market. We analyze the performance of the banks in the supply of the mortgages loan in the city of Sao Paulo of 1888 the 1901. Our research crosses bank balance sheets with mortgage registries to investigate the profile and behavior of institutional long term credit during a critical era in Sao Paulos history. We argue that the mortgage market at this had dramatic expansion and diversified of what they had pointed the previous studies regarding the banking and economic development. Mortgage banks were the single most important source of mortgage lending in the paulistano market, but sharply curtailed their new loan writing toward the end of the 1890s. Commercial banks lent money in mortgages for longer time periods than was typical for this type of institutions. Even foreign commercial banks, which were warned away from transactions with long time horizons, entered this market.

A Failure to Deliver Municipal Poverty and the Provision of Public Services in Imperial São Paulo, Brazil 1822–1889

Municipalities in imperial Brazil were required by law to provide a substantial range of public services to their communities, yet the structure of the tax code allocated meager fiscal resources to finance the full complement of these services. Municipal financial ledgers for four municipalities in the province of São Paulo confirm that local governments operated with a perennial shortage of funds, which constrained the provision of public services and infrastructure. Municipal councils paid for the immediate needs of urban life out of their limited resources and used a form of official begging to procure funds from the provincial legislature to pay for major expenses. These requests were required by law but did not always result in the needed funding. The legal framework in which municipalities functioned during the Brazilian empire, therefore, was one of institutionalized subordination and financial penury that compromised their ability to provide government services to municipal residents.

Is It Who You Know? Entrepreneurs and Bankers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This article examines the trust-producing mechanisms investors and financiers used in São Paulo, Brazil, to determine where to invest their money in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The coffee boom that began in the 1880s spurred bursts of new domestic business development that transformed São Paulo into Brazils industrial leader. Using shareholder and director data from an array of business sectors, this article demonstrates that early development (1856-1905) of the institutions that provided business finance was accompanied by highly personal relationships between financier and entrepreneur. By the early twentieth century (1906-1920), rapid economic growth and business diversification rendered these personal connections inadequate and hence less important to business finance. Investors and directors concentrated their energies and their money, abandoning the practice of forming broad connections in general—and connections to a bank in particular—and turned to the stock market instead. By providing an alternative to personal forms of trust production, the rise of impersonal intermediation promoted the significantly broadened market for corporate business formation that underwrote São Paulos economic transformation.