SELIC - o mercado de dívida pública no Brasil

Abstract

This Phd Thesis aims at understanding the institutional framework of the Special System for Settlement and Custody of Federal Government Securities (SELIC), created in 1979. It is argued that SELIC has merged the monetary and public debt markets in Brazil, a problem that is still running in the country's public debt market. Specifically, the objective of this PhD Thesis is to portray what the SELIC market is, including its origin, evolution over time and how it currently operates; in addition, it also analyzes the consequences of such structure for the Brazilian economy. In this regard, repercussions of the SELIC on the monetary and public debt management policies are discussed, namely the National Financial System being essentially focused on short term assets, mainly public securities; the high interest rates charged by banks and financial institutions to lend money; the high cost and strong volatility of the Federal Public Debt; and the difficulties to the development of capital markets in Brazil. The conclusions point to several difficulties that the institutional framework of SELIC causes to the Brazilian economy, especially to the structure of the National Financial System. However, solutions to these difficulties must be implemented seeking to solve them in the long term because they need to involve restructuring the nature of SELIC. To reach its objective, this Thesis uses two methods, namely literature review and documentary review, in which papers and formal documents about SELIC were used to guide the research.