ABSTRACT
These two papers on European banks and financiers in Latin America are both important and highly topical. Pre-1914 Latin America was extremely important to Europe, as a market, as a supplier of commodities and foodstuffs, and as an investment location. In 1914 around one-third of total British foreign direct investment (FDI) was located in Latin America. As Marichal and Triner state in Chapter 17, the handling of public debt by European investment bankers and, especially in the case of Brazil, the role of European-owned bankers in commercial banking, was on a large and impressive scale. From the interwar years these close financial and business links between Europe and Latin America fell away as Latin American governments acceded to populist demands for regulation and economic nationalism, and as the economic influence of the United States occupied much of whatever remained of investment and trade links with the outside world. For most of the twentieth century the British all but forgot that there was a subcontinent called Latin America, until rudely awakened by the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands Island colony in 1982. As in so much else, the 1990s have seen the restoration of nineteenth-century conditions. Deregulation, liberalization and a considerable flow of FDI into the bigger Latin American economies has provided new opportunities for European bankers and financiers. They have much to learn by looking at the historical record.
