ABSTRACT

The GAIA Group was a group of companies operating in the financial, real estate, educational, environmental, sports, and “quality of life” industries in Brazil. In 2009, Joao Paulo Pacífico founded GAIASec, a real estate securitizer in the middle of the global financial crisis, and soon after he founded GAIAServ, a credit management company. GAIA’s main product, securitization, is the process of taking an illiquid asset or group of assets and, through financial engineering, transforming it into security. Though at the end of 2020, the Brazilian securitization market had enormous potential, with a growth rate surpassing Brazil’s GDP and default rate under control, it was still very much concentrated in real estate and agribusiness assets. Brazil’s rise as a global economic power during the 2000s could in part be attributed to the Real Plan, a group of measures undertaken by the Brazilian government in 1994 to improve the country’s macroeconomic situation.