Canaries and Vultures: A Quantitative History of Monetary Mismanagement in Brazil

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Brazil went through a sequence of failed stabilization plans that tried to cope with an enduring hyperinflation. This paper uses a money demand model to evaluate monetary policies during those episodes. The consistency between the money supply and the expected conditional money demand growth rates is considered for each plan. It is shown that the unsuccessful programs were marked by excessive liquidity. The results not only suggest that the mismanagement of the monetary aggregates led to the failure of the plans, but also that the excessive liquidity could have been predicted.