Like many major Brazilian companies, Lojas Americanas
borrows money at a heavy discount from BNDES, the state-run national
development bank. Last year the store and an affiliate received R$2.7bn
in BNDES loans mostly at a taxpayer-subsidised rate that is about half
what many of its customers pay on their credit cards.
For Dilma Rousseff, who has just started her second term as president, the country’s sprawling development bank lies at the heart of many of the challenges she faces in righting a listing economy.
But now the belief in state-managed capitalism is being tested as Brazil’s economy enters its fifth year of stagnation. The cost of statist policies has become manifest in the rise of public debt and the budget deficit.
To avoid a credit rating downgrade, Ms Rousseff has appointed a new finance minister, Joaquim Levy. As well as bringing Brazil’s public finances under control, one of his main tasks is to rein in BNDES. The government has already outlined changes in the development bank’s policies as the focus intensifies on the role of private interests in the state.
The bank has grown so much that its subsidy costs the government more than Brazil’s much-lauded bolsa família monthly benefit for poor families — earning the bank the nickname Bolsa Empresário, or “tycoon grant”. Critics argue it is a source of economic distortion and cronyism that undermines Brazil’s hard-won democracy.
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Founded in 1952, BNDES originally fostered the country’s steel industry and created a shareholding arm, BNDESPar, to manage its equity investments. It aimed to address “market failure”, lending to industry when the private sector was unwilling or unable. Over the decades, particularly during Brazil’s period of runaway inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, long-term finance was not available from the market, so BNDES stepped into the breach.
During the PT governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Ms Rousseff, the bank exploded in size. BNDES’s total assets have grown nearly fourfold since 2007 to R$814bn as of June 30 last year, while disbursements last year were estimated at R$190bn, more than the annual output of neighbouring Uruguay.
Critics say the central complaint about BNDES is it essentially amounts to a transfer from taxpayers to businesses. This is particularly pernicious in a country that is one of the most unequal in the world. “There have to be some public objectives, some social justification,” Arminio Fraga, a former central bank governor and opposition figure, said of BNDES lending in an interview during the elections in October.
About 60 per cent of BNDES lending goes to large conglomerates rather than small and medium-sized enterprises, including many large companies deemed so-called “national champions”, in which it often also holds significant minority stakes.
BNDES and BNDESPar hold about 17.3 per cent of the
state-owned oil company Petrobras, while BNDESPar alone holds an
estimated 8.4 per cent of Vale,
the world’s biggest iron ore exporter, and 24.6 per cent of JBS, the
world’s largest meatpacker. BNDES also funded the oil, mining and
logistics empire of companies controlled by Eike Batista, who was
Brazil’s richest man until his group imploded last year.
All of these are quoted companies with ready access to western
capital markets, and do not need public money, critics say. Even Mr
Batista raised billions on the stock market before going bust. “The
large companies can raise money on their own — it will be more expensive
but it will not impede their investments,” said Sergio Lazzarini,
professor at São Paulo business school Insper and co-author of Reinventing State Capitalism, which analyses BNDES.
The dominant presence of BNDES in long-term lending has crowded out the private sector when record low interest rates globally might have fostered the domestic capital market, critics argue. Even some clients admit as much. “To be competitive, you have to take those BNDES rates into consideration,” Marcelo Odebrecht, the head of the eponymous construction group, said in Valor Economico, a business daily.
BNDES funding is so irresistible to businesses because it lends based on the TJLP, its long-term benchmark interest rate. As part of Mr Levy’s drive to clean up Brazil’s accounts, the government recently raised the TJLP for the first time in 10 years. Even so, it remains at only 5.5 per cent, less than half Brazil’s “risk-free” short-term rate, or Selic, which is set by the central bank and stands at 11.75 per cent.
BNDES can provide this generous subsidy because it enjoys cheap funding from two main sources — the treasury and workers’ employment insurance funds. For the workers, this implies a huge opportunity cost as they could have earned far higher market rates on the money elsewhere. “It’s like a transfer of wealth from workers to the industrialists,” says Aldo Musacchio, professor of business at Harvard and co-author of Reinventing State Capitalism.
The Treasury, meanwhile, incurs a loss as it raises money for the bank by issuing bonds at the Selic rate.
The government is defensive about criticism of BNDES. Guido Mantega, Brazil’s previous finance minister, claimed
the bank’s huge ramp-up in lending helped counter the effects of the
financial crisis. Yet the bank sustained high lending levels after the
crisis subsided in 2010. Last year’s outlays were as big as in 2013,
which was itself a record.
The
bank points to its competent staff — non-performing loans are
negligible and it makes more profits per employee than private sector
lender Itaú-Unibanco
and other development banks in Germany or China. It is not the clichéd
state bank that props up bad companies. Seth Colby, an academic at Johns
Hopkins University, said in a recent paper: “The policies of the BNDES are often contested, but its organisational capacity is highly regarded.”
Such arguments even call into question the raison d’être of BNDES. Brazil still only invests 17 per cent of gross domestic product every year — less than the 22 per cent or more needed to raise growth or investment rates in faster-growing Latin American countries such as Chile, Colombia, Mexico or Peru.
Nor has its lending necessarily led to more jobs being created. Mr Musacchio says listed companies that received BNDES funding usually did not increase their capital expenditure plans after receiving the loans. Instead, they used the cheap money to reduce their costs. “They are really lending to firms that don’t need the money,” he says.
That counters Ms Rousseff’s emphasis on policies that help the poor, although BNDES argues that such criticisms ignore its own research which shows the benefits of its programmes, especially for SMEs. It adds that borrowers such as Lojas Americanas receive money at higher rates than the TJLP, while support for JBS has mostly been in the form of equity.
Political impact
Arguably more serious, though, are charges that its activities distort Brazil’s macroeconomic and political landscape. Critics say Brasília uses BNDES and other state-run banks to dress up the budget deficit by having it pay dividends to the government from treasury bonds that it keeps on its books.
“You are transforming your own debt into revenue ... which is completely crazy,” says Almeida, a specialist in Brazilian government finances. BNDES denies this is a deliberate government policy.
There are also concerns that BNDES’s cheap capital might undermine the central bank’s efforts to control inflation. Its low rates mean other Brazilians have to suffer higher rates. Studies also show that donors to the ruling party tend to receive more BNDES money. The biggest donor in the 2014 election was JBS, the meatpacking group controlled by the Batista family (no relation to Eike Batista) with BNDES as a shareholder.
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