This article provides aggregate data on credit flows in Santafé de Bogotá, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador and western Venezuela). By perusing a thorough report submitted to Bourbon authorities on notarial transactions, which included both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical loans in the city, the article estimates the volume and size of lending activity while exploring how distinct types of credit interacted and shaped the business milieu of the region. It argues that by the late 1770s, Catholic Church lending had ceased to be the main source of investable funds in the region, with merchants and other non-ecclesiastical investors injecting growing funds into sectors traditionally avoided by ecclesiastical lenders such as commerce, mining and manufacturing. Network analysis suggests that merchants became brokers between different credit sources, alleviating information asymmetries and opening the credit market to borrowers with collateral and institutional restrictions willing to pay higher interest rates. Finally, by focusing on New Granada, the largest gold producer of the Spanish Empire, the article identifies some distinctive credit patterns that are different from those developed in silver-driven economies such as New Spain and Peru. Thus, the article provides new paths to study Latin American financial history.

The shortcomings and potential dangers of international financial flows for the health and stability of domestic banking systems in developing countries have been copiously discussed over the last decades. While the importance of capital controls and regulation as determining factors has been widely emphasised, the extent to which these policies work in episodes of financial crisis is still a matter of debate. This article examines the relationship between supervisory frameworks and banking fragility in Mexico and Brazil in the wake of the international debt crisis of 1982. It shows that the model of international banking intermediation that evolved out of the stringent capital mobility system in Brazil was considerably less vulnerable to crisis than in Mexico, which had a more lightly regulated regime. These findings provide insights into historical debates about the implications of prudential regulation and capital controls for the development and expansion of foreign finance, and whether the risks underlying international banking are necessarily inherent in the process of financial globalisation.

Between June 1959 and March 1964, the democratic governments of Brazilian presidents Juscelino Kubitschek (January 1956 – January 1961), Janio Quadros (January–August 1961), Ranieri Mazzilli (August–September 1961) and João ‘Jango’ Goulart (September 1961 – April 1964) received no support from the World Bank (WB), which refused to fund even a single new project during this period. During this same period, and, more specifically, between July 1958 and January 1965, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WB's twin institution, granted financial assistance to Brazil only twice: a controversial and highly conditional Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) signed in May 1961; and a non-conditional and automatically approved Compensatory Financial Facility (CFF), granted in May 1963 to compensate Brazil for the decrease in coffee prices on the international market.

This attitude towards Brazil changed significantly following the military coup of March 1964. Money flowed into the country and by 1970 Brazil had become the largest receiver of WB funds and a chronic borrower from the IMF, signing two SBAs in 1965, and one per year between 1966 and 1972. We use recently disclosed material from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank archives to analyse the relationship of these two institutions with Brazil and to foster the debate on their political neutrality, arguing that the difference in the IMF's and especially the WB's relations with the military regime reflected, more than anything else, the existence of an ideological affinity between the parties with regards to the ‘right’ economic policy.

This article seeks to analyze the cocoa circuits during the final years of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the transition towards independence and the beginning of the world cocoa crisis in 1820. Added to the traditional circuits of Guayaquil and Maracaibo linked with Pamplona, the article identifies circuits that were speculated to exist in the southwest of New Granada, but because they did not move large volumes, they were not considered for production statistics. These small productions supplied the domestic market, also exported or integrated into circuits from other places that had better interactions in international markets. It is not a microhistory of cocoa in remote regions, it is the history of a cocoa overshadowed by the visibility of others.

The recent European debt crisis has renewed interest as to why debtor countries honour their foreign debts and subscribe to respectively burdensome rescheduling conditions. While the cost of defaulting in a domestic financial system has been recognised as a main motive for repayment, the factors that cause sovereign states to refrain from debt repudiation are not fully understood. This article investigates the reasons behind the repayment decision and weak negotiating position of the Mexican government following the 1982 debt crisis. It shows that leading commercial banks had considerable amounts of external loans in their books, and that Mexican policymakers lacked the foreign exchange access they needed to secure the stability of the domestic banking system. The high exposure of domestic banks to Mexican debt and their heightened dependence on foreign capital worked as mechanisms that allowed international creditors to enforce their claims and deterred Mexico from declaring a unilateral default.

In this article I examine the history of the Mexican Stock Exchange from the end of the Revolution until 1975, under the hypothesis that it did not carry out its pertinent functions in corporate financing but was rather an economic and political instrument of the government. Due to state intervention and the deficient definition of property rights, its functioning was completely anomalous except during this period. The article represents a first step in the study of the role of the stock exchange in Latin American corporatist economic models.

The international banking crisis that began in 2007 has brought the relationship between international banking activities and financial crises to the forefront. The growing reliance on foreign interbank funding by domestic banks has been recognized as a crucial factor in explaining the banking and sovereign debt crisis currently affecting several peripheral European countries. This article shows that the link between financial crisis and international interbank lending is not a new phenomenon; a similar trend can be observed in the Mexican banking sector during the run-up to its 1982 debt crisis. I explore the international activities of Mexican commercial banks in the years preceding the country's default and demonstrate that they became involved in international lending which was funded largely through heavy short-term interbank foreign borrowing. I provide new archival evidence which shows that in intermediating foreign finance with local public and private borrowers, Mexican banks incurred maturity, interest rate and currency mismatches and dangerously increased their risk position. This article provides insights for understanding the Mexican debt crisis as closely intertwined with problems in the domestic banking sector, which were, in turn, linked to its involvement in the international financial system.

How could a primitive credit market finance the early industrialisation of an underdeveloped economy? To answer this question, we use a hand-collected data set of mortgage loans raised by industrial firms in the city of São Paulo during the period 1866-1914. These mortgages were debt obligations collateralised by land, improvements, machinery and equipment. We argue that the mortgage credit market was a key source of funding for early industrial investments in Brazil. We find that industries were mainly funded by non-banking and domestic agents. The empirical evidence suggests that mortgages were an important proxy for industrial investment.