Hamlet Without the Prince of Denmark: Relationship Banking and Conditionality Lending in the London Market for Foreign Government Debt, 1815-1913

This paper offers a theory of conditionality lending in 19th century international capital markets. We argue that ownership of reputation signals by prestigious banks rendered them able and willing to monitor government borrowing. Monitoring was a source of rent, and it led bankers to support countries facing liquidity crises in a manner similar to modern descriptions of relationship lending to corporate clients by parent banks. Prestigious bankers' ability to implement conditionality loans and monitor countries' financial policies also enabled them to deal with solvency. We find that, compared with prestigious bankers, bondholders' committees had neither the tools nor the prestige required for effectively dealing with defaulters. Hence such committees were far less important than previous research has claimed

A crise Baring e a crise do Encilhamento nos quadros da economia-mundo capitalista The Baring crisis and the Encilhamento crisis in the context of the capitalist world-economy

O final do século XIX foi marcado, para Brasil e Argentina, por crescimento e instabilidade na economia. Neste período, ocorreram duas importantes crises econômicas, que ficaram conhecidas como crise Baring (na Argentina) e crise do Encilhamento (no Brasil). Este artigo tem o objetivo de apresentar as conexões existentes entre essas duas crises e a conjuntura da economia-mundo capitalista das últimas décadas do século XIX, enfatizando o problema da dívida externa e da política econômica, e re-organizando algumas contribuições da historiografia econômica por meio da metodologia da "encompassing comparison" e da teoria dos ciclos mundiais de endividamento. O artigo mostra que ambas as crises estiveram condicionadas pela dinâmica da economia-mundo capitalista, especialmente pelos fluxos mundiais de capital, não sendo resultados exclusivos de políticas econômicas nacionais.<br>The end of the 19th century was characterized by economic growth and instability in Brazil and Argentina. In this period, two important economic crises took place - the Baring Crisis (in Argentina) and the Encilhamento Crisis (in Brazil). The aim of this paper is to present the connections between these two crises and the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy of the end of the 19th century, focusing on the problems of external debt and economic policy and re-organizing some contributions of economic historiography through the methodology of "encompassing comparison" and of the world debt cycles' theory. The paper concludes that both crises were influenced by the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy, especially by the international flows of capital, and that they were not exclusive results of national economic policies