A special report on business and finance in Brazil

Survival of the quickest
最速者生存

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Frequent crises have made for strong banks and nimble financiers
频繁发生危机已使银行更健全，金融业者思惟更敏捷

BRAZILIAN businessmen often say that the country’s recent economic past has strengthened companies, and especially banks. The argument goes like this: you need to be good, or at least inventive, to survive and make money when you have no idea whether inflation next year will be 50% or 500%. Bankers and finance directors have had to be particularly nimble. One example is Souza Cruz (a subsidiary of BAT), Brazil’s largest tobacco company, which in the days of high inflation did no better than break even on its cigarette sales. Its profits came from the interest on the cash it held between being paid by retailers and paying tax fortnightly. Companies used to operating in such unusual circumstances flourished when life became more predictable.

巴西商人经常说，巴西最近在经济上的经历增强了公司体质，尤其是银行业。类似说法包括︰贵公司必须体质更好（或至少具备创新能力）以存活下来，在意想不到的时机赚大钱，无论明年通货膨胀将是50%或500%。尤其，银行业者和金融主管的思惟必须更敏捷灵活。举一个例子，巴西最大烟草商Souza Cruz（英美烟草BAT子公司）在高通膨期间，香烟销量甚至几乎与歇业时期一样。该公司却从零售商支付货款与隔周缴税之间的盈余现金衍生利息上获利。当景气转好时，过去习惯于在非常时期经营的公司就发大财了。

There is some truth to this argument, even though it brushes aside the fact that until the 1990s Brazilian companies did not have to worry about foreign competitors. No big companies went bust in the recent financial crisis, despite losses on foreign-exchange derivatives that the Bank for International Settlements estimates at $25 billion. Moreover, no big banks wobbled, let alone had to be rescued, though there were some mergers.

有一些事实可以支撑这个说法，即使该说法漠视在巴西公司企业在1990年代之前从不必担心外国竞争者的事实。尽管国际结算银行估计，最近金融海啸期间巴西外汇损失高达250亿美元，但没有任何一家大型企业破产。此外也没有一家大型银行财务不稳，遑论需要政府救援，但有发生一些合并。

One reason was that a previous round of bank failures, in 1994, had already cleared out the bad ones. Until then banks made their profits by taking deposits from customers, lending the money to the government overnight and pocketing the difference. With inflation at several hundred per cent a year, many banks’ balance-sheets were hard to decipher. When inflation came down, it became clear that a number of them were insolvent. These folded or merged with other banks, leaving only the stronger ones.

理由之一是1994年前一波银行倒闭，已经清理了体质较差的银行。在那之前，这些银行藉由提领客户存款、一夜之间借钱给政府并装进别人的口袋来赚取利润。由于一年内通膨高达几个百分之七八百，很多银行资产负债表根本无法判读。当通膨来临，很明显许多银行面临破产。这些银行纷纷倒闭或与其它银行合并，只留下体质较健全的银行。

Brazil’s financial system got a further boost from reforms carried out when Arminio Fraga was governor of the central bank from 1999 until the start of 2003 (he is now at Gávea Investimentos, an investment firm). The country’s bank-settlement system now operates in real time, so all banks know their cash positions at any given moment and the central bank has an overall picture of what is happening. Before this system was introduced the central bank often ended up honouring the debts of banks that went bust, creating a dangerous incentive to be careless. Both Mr Fraga and his successor as governor, Henrique Meirelles, have made sure that banks report what is going on in any off-balance-sheet vehicles they have funded. This has helped to keep under control the special investment vehicles, conduits and other mysterious creatures that have caused so much damage in other countries.

巴西金融体系在Arminio Fraga担任央行行长期间（1999至2003年初）进行大刀阔斧改革并获得大幅提升，目前他担任投资公司Gávea Investimentos总裁。巴西的银行结算制度目前以实时方式运作，因此所有银行在任何时刻都能掌握自己的现金状况，而央行则掌控各银行实时情况的总图。这套制度引进之前，央行经常要收拾残局支付破产银行的债务，建立了危险诱因却不自知。Arminio Fraga和下一任行长Henrique Meirelles，确保各银行的报表在他们设立之不列入资产负债的任何平台上继续运转。这些有利于控管曾在其它国家造成严重伤害的特别投资平台、管道和其它神秘工具。

This transparency extends to financial markets too. All fund managers must disclose the net asset value of their funds to Brazil’s Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) daily, though with a 48-hour delay. At the end of every month funds must disclose what they were holding 90 days ago. Anyone can go to the CVM’s website and look up these numbers. Fund managers may grumble about too much disclosure, but most are happy with the rules. Maria Helena Santana, who chairs the CVM, explains that they make it harder to pull off a scam of the sort run by Bernard Madoff, whose pyramid scheme was hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

此一透明制度亦延伸至金融市场。所有基金经理人每天必须向巴西证券交易委员会（CVM）公开他们手上基金的净资产价值，但有48小时延迟。在每个月底，各檔基金必须公开他们90天以前的持股比例，任何人都可以去CVM的网站查阅这些数字。基金经理人虽然可能因公开太多而牢骚满腹，但大多数经理人都乐于接受法规约束。CVM主席Maria Helena Santana阐述，他们会使Bernard Madoff操作的诈骗手法（藏身在秘密面纱后的树状网）更难抽身。

Created equal 建立公平制度

Equity investors, for their part, have benefited from new rules for publicly traded companies brought in by the São Paulo stock exchange (Bovespa) in 2002. Big Brazilian companies used to be notorious for abusing shareholders with minority stakes. Under current guidelines, it is illegal to issue shares that pay out different amounts to different holders in the event of a takeover. Any disputes between shareholders are judged by the CVM. With these rules in place, foreigners have been happy to buy shares and Brazilian companies that were unable to borrow in capital markets are now able to finance their expansion.

适用于公开上市公司的新法规在2002年引进圣保罗股市（Bovespa）后，股票投资人亦因而获利。巴西大型企业过去因坑杀持股少数的小股东而臭名昭彰。根据现今规范，在收购过程配发不同股东不同股息比例的股票就是非法的。股东之间的任何争论由CVM裁判。由于这些法规到位，外资乐于购买巴西股票，过去在资本市场借不到钱的巴西企业，现在可以筹措资金大展鸿图。

A boom in initial public offerings (IPOs) followed. At its height, in 2007, 80% of the money for IPOs came from foreign investors. This undoubtedly led to some excesses: at one point there were more listed housebuilders in Brazil than in America. But some of the companies that floated will do well. And the message conveyed by the new rules—that better corporate governance allows people to make money by selling bits of their companies on the stock exchange—has been good for the family businesses that make up the bulk of Brazil’s medium-sized firms.

首次公开售股（IPOs）的荣景接踵而至。极盛时期，2007年，八成左右的IPOs资金来自外资。这无疑造成了某些过度现象︰巴西股票上市的房屋营造商曾经一度比美国的还要多。但是，某些流通股票的公司反而业绩亮眼。并且，新的法规传达出一种讯息──更好的公司管理允许员工利用出售部分公司持股在股市赚钱──对于构成巴西中型企业绝大部分的家族企业而言绝对有益。

Reuters

Plenty to Celebrate
很多事情值得庆祝

Santander Brasil’s recent IPO was a test of whether investors’ appetite for Brazil had returned. It proved to be the world’s largest IPO this year, valuing the bank’s Brazilian subsidiary at more than the whole of Deutsche Bank worldwide. The government is so worried about foreign portfolio investors pushing up the value of the real that it imposed a 2% tax in October to discourage them. IPOs have a wider benefit because companies that want to float all or part of their stock need to get their accounts in order, pay their taxes and make sure their workers are not part of the black economy.

Santander Brasil（土生金银行巴西子公司）最近一次IPO就是外资是否对于巴西恢复信心的测试。这次发行被证实为今年全球最大一笔IPO，使得Santander银行巴西子公司资产超越了全球Deutsche Bank（德意志银行）的总和。巴西政府非常担心外资持股投资人会让黑奥（巴西币）强劲升值，于是在今年十月征收2%税金以阻挡外资进场。IPOs拥有很大利益，想要流通全部或部分股票的公司需要按顺序建立自己的账户、支付自己的税款，并确保自己的员工不是逃税的黑市经济之一。

All this has brought sophistication and liquidity to Brazil’s financial markets. São Paulo’s futures and options market is one of the five largest in the world by volume traded. Well-developed markets have been good for consumers too. High interest rates, high inflation and dysfunctional courts once made consumer credit rarer than snow. Thanks in part to a series of reforms carried out in Lula’s first term, credit has grown steadily. Loans for bigger items, such as cars and apartments, have become available for the first time, thanks to a new law under which a lender remains the owner of the asset acquired with the loan until the last repayment is made, whereas previously the money would have had to be chased up through the courts.

所有这些已经让巴西金融市场更加成熟和流动。以交易量而言，圣保罗期货市场排名全球五大期货市场之一，完善发展的市场也对于消费者有益。高利率、高通膨和功能不彰的法院一度使消费者贷款消失殆尽。部分归因于鲁拉总统第一任期进行的一连串改革，消费者融资已经稳定成长。大笔金额（例：汽车和公寓）的贷款第一次可以提供，归因于一项新法，出借人在收回最后一笔偿债之前仍是那笔贷款的资产拥有人，不像从前债务必须经由法院去追踪。

Lula’s first administration also introduced a new bankruptcy law that is credited with making it slightly easier to salvage something from companies that go under. There was room for improvement: a few years ago a World Bank study found that bankruptcy proceedings in Brazil took an average of ten years and left creditors with just two cents in every dollar owed.

鲁拉的第一任政府亦引进了新破产法，提供贷款使得抢救某些公司免于破产更为容易。还有需要改进的空间︰几年前，世界银行的一项研究发现破产程序在巴西平均要花十年工夫，而债权人仅能从每一美元的欠债拿回两美分。

Yet for all this progress, two glaring problems with Brazil’s financial system remain. First, credit is very expensive. Second, only the government will lend for long periods, and not to everyone.

可是，由于全部这些发展使巴西金融制度留下两个耀眼问题。首先，融资非常昂贵。其次，只有政府可以办理长期借款，而且不是提供给每个人。

Tax and lend  征税和放款

Brazil has a hybrid retail banking system, with state-controlled and private-sector banks competing directly. It is highly concentrated: Itaú Unibanco, the largest private bank, is among the world’s 15 biggest on several measures and yet has almost no presence outside Brazil. Banco do Brasil, the largest state-controlled bank and one of the world’s oldest financial institutions, vies with it for the title of the country’s biggest bank. All told, credit from state-controlled banks makes up 37.6% of the total and has recently been growing.

巴西拥有一套混合的零售金融制度，由国营银行与民营银行直接竞争。这是高度集中的︰巴西最大的民营银行Itaú Unibanco，从某些标准而言排名全球十五大银行之列，但在巴西以外几乎不存在。最大国营银行和全球最古老的金融机构之一Banco do Brasil（巴西银行），与Itaú Unibanco竞争巴西最大银行头衔。据说，国营银行的融资金额占总金额37.6%，并且最近还在成长。

Despite their different owners, the state-controlled and the private banks seem to be behaving in a remarkably similar way. Aldemir Bendini, the chief executive of Banco do Brasil, talks enthusiastically about international expansion. The bank will soon open five agencies in America to serve Brazilian expatriates. It also wants to help Brazilian multinationals abroad with local-currency financing. Meanwhile it will keep up its role as an instrument of public policy that does the bidding of the federal government, its biggest shareholder, and also look after the 22% of its shareholders who own traded stock. It looks like an incongruous mixture, but it appears to work. Itaú Unibanco too is keen on expansion abroad, but makes so much money at home that it does not seem to be in a rush.

尽管他们的所有人不同，但国营和民营银行在行为表现上却似乎非常相似。Banco do Brasil首席执行长Aldemir Bendini热情地谈论在国际上的扩展业务。该银行不久将在美国开设五家分行，提供给移居国外的巴西人，亦想要以当地货币融资协助在海外的巴西跨国企业。同时将保持身为公共政策执行工具的角色，替最大股东联邦政府进行国际招标作业，并且照顾持有上市交易股票比例22%的一般股东。虽然看起来像是不和谐的混合物，但Banco do Brasil似乎却工作。Itaú Unibanco亦对扩展国外业务有强烈兴趣，但在国内赚了太多钱，好像一点都不匆忙。

In theory, all this should provide plenty of competition, with the two types of bank keeping each other honest and making sure that Brazilians have access to credit. In practice it does not quite work like that. Even though Itaú alone has 25,000 cash points, more than 500 municipalities in Brazil lack even a single bank branch. The two kinds of bank compete most fiercely in the comparatively wealthy south and south-east of the country. Banco do Brasil recently added to the geographical concentration by buying Nossa Caixa, a São Paulo state savings bank, and a large stake in Banco Votorantim, a private-sector bank.

理论上，这一切应该提供大量竞争力，让两种不同类型银行维持彼此诚实并确保巴西民众可以取得融资。实际上，却完全不是那么回事。虽然单就Itaú银行而言就有25,000家分行，但巴西五百多个市镇甚至连一家分行都没有。两家银行在巴西最富裕的南部和东南部激烈竞争，Banco do Brasil最近藉由并购圣保罗州营储蓄银行Nossa Caixa及民营银行Banco Votorantim的大半股份，来增加在地理上的集中性。

The government has raised the limit for foreign participation in Banco do Brasil to 20% to attract more capital, but the state-controlled banks are not as well run as the private-sector ones, so the hoped-for competition has not materialised. The clearest sign of this is spreads—the difference between a bank’s cost of borrowing and lending. The Institute for Industrial Development, a lobby group, calculates that average lending rates are 35% higher than deposit rates, against less than 10% in the other BRIC countries. The bankers’ lobby disputes these figures, but nobody thinks that banks’ spreads are thin.

巴西政府已将外资入股Banco do Brasil的比例限制提高至两成以吸引更多资本，但国营银行并不像民营银行经营完善，因此期盼的竞争一直未具体化。银行扩张业务最明显的征兆──银行存放款成本之间的价差。游说团体「工业发展研究院」计算，巴西平均放款利率较存款比率高出35%，其它金砖国家则不及10%。虽然银行业者的游说团还在争吵这些数字，但没人相信银行的扩张仍嫌不足。

Among the things that make them fatter are a curious tax on bank funding that increases costs, and high reserve requirements which mean that banks must squeeze more revenue from what they are able to lend. Bad-loan provisions are high too, reflecting the fact that consumer credit is concentrated among people who are already stretched. And a lot of credit is subsidised, which pushes up costs for the rest.

其中，银行在筹募资金过程巧立名目增税使放款成本提高让银行业者的油水更多，而高额准备金需求意味银行必须从他们的放款能力赚取更多收入。呆帐金额也水涨船高，反映了消费者融资集中在展延偿债期限者的事实。而且许多融资接受补助，抬高了其它项目的成本。

Brazil’s banks have many things to recommend them; indeed they seem to exemplify what might happen if regulators elsewhere got their every wish. They are safe and their lending is well-capitalised and profitable. Two-thirds of Brazilian deposits are in local banks, which is unusually high for Latin America and a big change from the past, when anyone who had money kept it out of the country and in dollars. The banks also offer some things that would surprise American or European customers. Many ATMs provide a wide range of financial services, from dispensing cash to providing loans. Even so, for now credit is likely to remain too expensive for the country’s good.

巴西各银行做了很多事情使他们受到欢迎；假若其它地方的金管官员想要达成每一愿望，他们甚至可以举证未来可能发生的情况。巴西银行很安全且放款资本充足和有盈利。巴西三分之二的存款在地方银行，这对拉美国家而言是非常罕见的偏高，过去有钱人喜欢在国外以美元开户存款，现在已经发生了变化。银行亦提供一些令欧美客户惊讶的服务。很多自动提款机提供各种金融服务，从提领现金到提供借款。虽然如此，目前融资很可能对于巴西利益来说仍然太贵了。

For companies trying to get credit, the problems are much the same. To make up for the absence of a market in long-term debt Brazil created a giant development bank, the BNDES, with a balance-sheet larger than the World Bank’s. This is financed by an impost on labour and lends predominantly to Brazil’s biggest companies—the opposite of what you would expect from a left-leaning country.

对于试图取得融资的公司来说，面对的问题几乎大同小异。为了弥补长期负债期间欠缺一个市场，巴西成立巨型开发银行BNDES（国营经社发展银行），资产负债表金额甚至较世界银行还大。BNDES从劳务税取得资金而以巴西最大企业为主要放款对象──可以预期来自左倾国家的反对。

Because its large loans to Brazil’s big names carry so little risk, the BNDES is profitable. It also does some more adventurous lending, although trickier credit assessments are farmed out to private banks, which collect a fee for their pains and also assume the risk of loans going bad. The BNDES was useful to Brazil during the recent crisis as a stable source of funding, but its scale as the lender of choice for Brazil’s best credit risks is probably impeding the development of markets in long-term debt, and the way it is funded seems fundamentally unjust.

因为BNDES提供巴西大型企业的大笔贷款承担较少风险，所以BNDES仍是赚钱的。BNDES亦进行一些较具风险性的放款，但较棘手的信用评等则外包给民营银行，民营银行因承担痛苦而收取费用，亦假定贷款的风险会变得更糟。BNDES在最近金融海啸期间作为稳定的资金来源，对于巴西非常受用，但作为巴西最佳融资风险的放款者，BNDES的规模或许妨碍了长期负债期间的市场发展，而且BNDES取得资金的方式似乎基本上有欠公平。

Still, compared with the bank failures, frauds, market manipulation, volatility, disregard for contracts and near-absence of credit of the past, Brazil’s financial sector has come a long way. Foreign investors have noticed, and have recently started pouring money into the country.

尽管如此，与银行倒闭、欺诈、市场操控、反复无常，漠视合约及过去的几乎缺乏融资相比较，巴西金融业已经走了很长的路。外资已经注意到了，最近已经开始让热钱涌入巴西。