Tasas de interés y desempeño económico: el crédito comercial en Santafé de Bogotá, 1760-1810

Abstract

Resumen. Este artículo analiza el crédito otorgado por los comerciantes de Santafé de Bogotá entre 1760 y 1809. Para ello, se han construido series de tasas de interés y préstamos en moneda y efectos de Castilla que permiten analizar su comportamiento a largo plazo. Se encontró que los mercaderes capitalinos pusieron a disposición de la economía colonial cantidades crecientes de fondos prestables. Por su parte, la evolución de las tasas de interés indica una reducción de los tipos máximos a fines de siglo y una cierta elasticidad de la oferta de crédito frente a dicha reducción. Además, se sostiene que el mercado monetario disminuyó significativamente sus costos de transacción y aumentó su tasa de rotación de capital. Así, aumentaron los incentivos para que los comerciantes aumentaran sus créditos en moneda, lo que pudo haber impulsado el crecimiento económico.Palabras clave: historia económica; crédito; tasa de interés; comerciantes; Santafé de Bogotá.Abstract. This article analyzes the credit given by merchants in Santafe de Bogota between 1760 and 1809. This required the preparation of interest rates and loans in both currency and Castilian effects, which permitted a long-term behavior analysis. It was found that the capital's merchants made increasing amounts of loanable funds available for the colonial economy. Meanwhile, towards the end of the century, the evolution of interest rates points towards a reduction in the maximum rates, as well as a consequential relaxation of the credit supply. Furthermore it became apparent that the money market significantly reduced its transaction costs while swelling its capital turnover, thus creating an increased incentive for merchants to augment their currency loans, which in turn may have stimulated economic growth.

Credit networks and business dynamics in a viceregal capital: Santafé de Bogotá in the age of Charles III

“…Guarantors and unlimited liability ( responsabilidad general de los bienes ) were used to back up the loan alongside common mortgages. The obligaciones tended to be like depósitos but included deferred payments of merchandise and movables sold on credit (Torres 2014).…”

“…Despite the lack of information on interest rates in the dataset, the literature has shown different rates according to the institutional source of credit. Mercantile lenders could charge higher prices than religious institutions that supplied funds (Torres 2014; Ortiz 2016). After 1760, despite this heterogeneity, rates declined across all the different types of lenders, spurring economic growth.…”

“…Pre-industrial Latin America's financial and monetary history has experienced steady growth in the last two decades. New time series of the volume and structure of credit flows and monetary aggregates have complemented microeconomic analyses of financial services and provided a new vision of the region's financial patterns (Vizcarra and Sicotte 2009; Carrara 2010; Levy 2012; Torres 2014, 2021; Ortiz 2016; Valle and Ibarra 2017; Valencia 2018; Zegarra 2017a, 2017b). Despite these contributions, several puzzles remained to be studied.…”

“…Studies of credit networks have shown the heterogeneity of Church lending, emphasizing the rational decision-making of ecclesiastical institutions in loan allocation (Wobeser 2011; Valle 2012; Ortiz 2016; Quintanar 2017; Cascavita 2021). Recent research has also focused on the structure and size of non-ecclesiastical sources of credit, evidencing how, during the late colonial period, there was an expansion of merchant credit flows and the sophistication of financial tools (Ibarra 2017; Cascavita 2021; Gutiérrez and Torres 2021; Torres 2014, 2021). In line with new research on European and Asian economies, the literature has also shown that pre-industrial credit markets were more dynamic and larger in GDP than previously thought (Hoffman et al 1999, 2015; Ito 2013; Ecchia 2014).…”

Más allá de los sumarios de cargo y data: un acercamiento a las cuentas de la Caja Real de Santafé en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII

“…Algunos de ellos dan cuenta del desempeño económico a través de los cargos y datas de las cajas reales, como en el caso de Meisel (2011a), mientras que otros dan cuenta del proceso de la consolidación del aparato político (Pinto, 2016(Pinto, , 2018, algunas investigaciones logran desentrañar los pormenores del sector gremial y su vinculación con el ámbito scal (Arévalo y Rodríguez, 2001). Otras investigaciones han logrado determinar el movimiento de los ujos comerciales con base en los libros de alcabalas (Moreno, 2013;Muñoz y Torres, 2013), construyendo una visión amplía del desempeño económico con base en el estudio del comportamiento del sector minero (Torres, 2013) o del mercado de crédito (Torres, 2014).…”