Mudanças recentes no sistema bancário nacional: impactos sobre sua forma de atuação

Abstract

This paper intends to analyze whether the changes that have occurred in the national banking system in recent years have changed its logic of operation. Among the changes that have occurred in this system, we have a reduction in the number of state banks and an increase in the participation of foreign institutions. The central issue is the supply of credit, since credit was expected to grow again with stabilization. This actually happened shortly after the implementation of the Real Plan, however, credit growth was not sustained for long. The credit issue was analyzed in comparison with other forms of investments and analyzed within a periodization that considers the specific moments of high profitability arising from speculative operations. Such moments were precisely the periods when the country was affected by international crises. We note that, in these periods, the Government, to avoid the outflow of foreign exchange, raised interest rates and issued government bonds with good profitability. It was these bonds that provided great profitability to those who acquired them: the banking system and other participants in the financial market. This demonstrates the permanence of speculative logic and that the banking system has other forms of investments that are not necessarily credit operations. The change in the structure of banking assets highlights this fact. In the analyzed period, there was an increase in the participation of bonds and securities over the total assets, to the detriment of the participation of credit operations. We aim to demonstrate that the new design of the banking system, characterized by a reduction in the participation of public banks and an increase in the participation of foreign banks, does not change the operating profile of private banks. This is because foreign banks, in general, acted in the same way as national private banks, maintaining and reinforcing the speculative logic of the banking system. To better understand this issue, we seek to show how the banking system's chances of gain were directly linked to Plano Real's policies. We will see that the macroeconomic policies adopted by the country created a trap for the economy, the counterpart of which was a growing worsening of the country's internal and external accounts, while there was a great profit for the financial institutions.