Presença Estatal no Mercado de Crédito: o papel dos bancos públicos e do crédito direcionado na crise de 2008

This study documents the roles played by state ownership and earmarked credit policies during crises. We focus on the case of Brazil during the global financial crisis of 2008. We want to know if there is an association between the amount of loans granted during the crisis and ownership type (private or government owned); and between earmarked loans during the crisis and ownership type. Our analyses suggest that private banks significantly reduced the amount of loans granted during the most severe period of the crisis. By contrast, government owned banks expanded the volume of loans granted during the same period, both regular loans and those that are earmarked, possibly acting in a counter cyclical manner. We did not find a statistically significant increase in the percentage of earmarked loans over total loans during the most severe period of the crisis. We also did not find evidence of an association between the percentage of earmarked loans to total loans in the pre-crisis period and the average growth of loans during the crisis. Banks that received additional funding during the crisis had a higher rate of loan growth; but this association does not explain the different behaviors of state-owned and private banks. There was no statistically significant increase in the rate of earmarked to total loans during the crisis. We did not find evidence of association between previous participation in the earmarked credit market and the growth rate of loans during the crisis. The bulk of our results suggest that state-owned banks have contributed to soften the negative impact of the 2008 financial crisis over the loan markets in Brazil, but earmarked loans granted by deposit-taking institutions were not relevant to this end.