Abstract

"Correspondent Banking Networks in Mexico from the First Economic Globalization through the Early Bretton Woods Era: Three Case Studies (1895-1956)"

Manuel Alejandro Bautista-González, University of Oxford (oekonomie@gmail.com)

Scholars have traced the contours of Latin America’s financial development since independence, focusing on how international business cycles and volatile capital flows tethered the region’s economic performance. Latin America’s integration into global finance had profound effects, as some of the region’s financial crises had adverse impacts on global financial stability, most notably in the 1930s and the 1980s. The region’s emerging markets integrated into the international payments system during the first economic globalization (1870-1914), retreated during the Great Depression, slowly built-up connections to financial capitals in the economic core during the Bretton Woods era (1945-early 1971), and then intensely increased its links to international finance circuits until the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. However, standard accounts have not studied how banks in Mexico and South America established ties with financial entities in global financial centres.

This paper focuses on the formation and functioning of Mexico’s international banking networks from the first economic globalization (1870-1914) to the early Bretton Woods era by studying three financial entities: Banco Nacional de México (Banamex, now Citibanamex), Banco de Comercio (Bancomer, now BBVA), and the Banco de México (Banxico, Mexico’s central bank). It reconstructs these banks’ bilateral connections to correspondents and agents in global financial centres (London, New York, Paris) in three periods: 1895-1914 (Banamex), 1926-1931 (Banxico), and 1947-1956 (Bancomer), mobilizing quantitative and qualitative evidence ranging from annual reports, minutes from shareholders’ meetings, correspondence and memoranda. This paper is part of the Global Correspondent Banking 1870-2000 (GloCoBank) project at the University of Oxford, assembling long-run datasets and archival-based case studies on Latin American banks’ relations within the region and with core financial centres.