Baring Brothers

Baring Brothers, a London merchant bank founded in 1763 by the Baring family to finance trade with the United States and India. During the Napoleonic Wars it was engaged in substantial operations for the British treasury. The firm soon became one of the major powers in international finance. Between 1820 and 1870 it provided numerous government loans for France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and Canada, among others. In Latin America it placed a Buenos Aires foreign loan in 1824, a Chilean railway loan in 1858, and a Venezuelan loan in 1862. During the 1880s it became the principal banker to the governments of Argentina and Uruguay, leading international banking syndicates in issuing six Argentine national loans and three Uruguayan loans. However, its excesses led to bankruptcy in November 1890, causing a major financial crisis in London, known as the Baring panic. Upon its reorganization in 1892, the firm reassumed its role as leading banker to Argentina, issuing eight loans for that nation between 1907 and 1914. In later years its importance in Latin American finance declined, although it continued to maintain close ties with the Argentine government until 1946, when Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón liquidated the foreign debt of the government. In other fields of international finance, Baring Brothers remained active on the London money market, particularly as investment counselor to British firms operating abroad. In the 1970s Baring Brothers once again began placing international loans for Latin American governments, frequently as a member of the banking syndicates that issued external bonds. Rash speculation in the Far East brought the firm to the brink of collapse in 1995 and it was later sold.

See alsoBanking: Overview .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ralph Hidy, The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763–1861 (1949).

Armando O. Chiapella, El destino del empréstito Baring Brothers (1975).

Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: A History of One of the Greatest of All Banking Families, the House of Baring, 1762–1929 (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Leeson, Nicholas W., and Edward Whitley. Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Ortega Peña, Rodolfo, and Eduardo Luis Duhalde. Baring Brothers y la historia política argentina; La banca británica y el proceso histórico nacional de 1824 a 1890. Buenos Aires Editorial Sudestada, 1973.

                                Carlos Marichal