The State became the country's only structurer. Whoever lacks the BNDES answers the fear alone.

The public guarantee should be a bridge, not an address: the true test of the BNDES will not be how much it lent in 2009, but how many markets will exist when it no longer needs to lend alone.

Brazil found a way to cross the crisis: it turned the State into the country's largest credit structurer. The BNDES reached extraordinary disbursements, received capital from the Treasury, and occupied the space abandoned by the private market. The measure can be defended as countercyclical. The problem begins when the emergency presents itself as a permanent model and the privilege of a few starts being called industrial policy for all.

In a crisis, the private creditor shortens tenors, increases collateral, and preserves cash. The public bank does the opposite because its function includes answering the fear the market cannot price. That can prevent good projects from dying of temporary illiquidity. It can also prevent bad projects from dying when they should. The same institution that stabilizes the cycle can freeze the errors inside it. The difference depends less on the volume disbursed than on the quality of the design and the discipline to exit when normality returns.

The BNDES is not merely a big bank. It is a machine able to offer tenor, scale, and cost no private competitor can reproduce, because it funds itself under a different logic and carries the State on its balance sheet. When that machine grows, the market does not merely lose share. It loses its reference. The subsidized rate stops being an exception and starts looking like the fair price; private credit, which must remunerate capital, risk, and liquidity, looks like usury. The comparison is politically useful and economically fraudulent.

Whoever has access to the BNDES does not buy only cheaper money. He buys time. Infrastructure projects, machinery purchases, and industrial expansion need long liabilities. The Brazilian banking system, funded largely by short obligations and protected by high spreads, rarely delivers that time without public support. The development bank fills a real gap. But by filling it alone, it reduces the incentive for private architecture to mature.

The result is a two-floor economy. On the upper floor, large groups have financial teams, institutional relationships, organized collateral, and the capacity to fit projects into the available lines. They negotiate tenor, grace, index, and participation. On the lower floor, the entrepreneur shows statements to the manager and receives a rate table. One side discusses structure. The other asks about limits. The official discourse calls both credit takers. It is like calling both a private jet and a bus line transportation.

The BNDES's countercyclical action in 2009 will demonstrate that the cost of credit is not a law of nature. When the creditor accepts longer tenors, uses adequate collateral, and receives funding support, the rate changes. But the popular interpretation will be wrong: they will say the State merely needs to charge less. It does not suffice. The State charges less because it can fund itself differently, accept lower returns, transfer risk to the taxpayer, and wait longer. The price is the consequence of an invisible architecture. Copying only the rate is copying the shadow and forgetting the object.

There is also a selection problem. Public credit tends to seek large projects because the cost of analysis is high and the political impact is measurable. A billion-real disbursement produces a headline, an inauguration, and a photograph. A thousand one-million operations demand systems, standardization, data, and distributed collection. The public bank can reach small companies through financial agents, but those agents still control the door. The subsidy crosses the institution and reaches the client carrying the same branch it intended to bypass.

I do not consider the BNDES an aberration. Countries that want long-term infrastructure must solve the mismatch between the tenor of the assets and the tenor of the financial system. The mistake lies in confusing the existence of a development bank with the necessary nonexistence of a development market. The State should use its capacity to create standards, absorb specific risks, build track records, and invite private capital. When it finances everything alone, it replaces the market instead of manufacturing it.

A healthy structure could use the BNDES as an anchor, not as the exclusive owner of the risk. The bank could take a subordinated tranche, guarantee defined events, or finance a share of the project, letting funds, insurers, and investors buy layers compatible with their mandates. The risk would be decomposed. The subsidy would be explicit. Private capital would learn to analyze. The project would gain a price curve. Instead, Brazilian practice frequently delivers a bilateral contract and calls the result development.

The entrepreneur without access learns the system's wrong answer. He concludes the problem is not knowing the right people, when the problem is often not presenting the right asset. His company mixes property, operations, receivables, inventory, and personal wealth. No flow is isolated, no collateral is prepared, no obligation has clear priority. The bank sees confusion and demands everything. The entrepreneur sees abuse and seeks influence. Both avoid the work of design.

The crisis offers an opportunity to change that. With private credit retracted, good assets become visible because they must explain why they deserve capital. Receivables from solid clients, supply contracts, productive properties, essential equipment, and recurring revenue can sustain specific operations. The corporate balance sheet stops being the only answer. It is possible to finance the flow instead of the surname, provided documentation and control are built.

My position in 2009 would be twofold. I would look for companies benefiting from legitimate access to long financing, especially where the liability allowed crossing the crisis without dilution and where the project produced real cash. But I would severely discount businesses whose competitive advantage was merely cheap public credit. Subsidy can increase profit without increasing productivity. When the source dries up, the multiple discovers that political capital was not economic capital.

In credit, I would seek private operations that competed on design, not nominal rate. Receivables funds with real subordination, granular portfolios, and originators retaining risk; project debentures with predictable contracts; financings secured by assets whose value did not depend on the same cycle threatening the debtor. I would avoid companies using short debt to finance long expansion merely because they expected state or bank renewal.

I would also watch infrastructure providers able to serve the lower floor: platforms for registration, portfolio analysis, collection, documentation, and distribution. The BNDES dominates because it can bear the cost of understanding complex operations. Technology can reduce that cost for smaller operations. The future of credit will not be merely more capital. It will be making it economically viable to analyze a small loan with the discipline of a large project.

The political risk is credit becoming an instrument for picking champions. The government always believes it recognizes the strategic sector before the market does, especially when it does not book the cost of error the same way. The chosen company grows, buys competitors, and attributes the expansion to managerial excellence. The taxpayer provides funding; the bank provides its seal; the market provides the valuation. Everyone looks like a genius until the leverage must be paid without official applause.

A mature credit policy should publish the subsidy, measure additionality, and demand that the operation create capacity that would not otherwise exist. If the borrower could finance himself normally, public money merely transfers income. If the project cannot attract any private capital even with construction risk mitigated, perhaps the problem is not the market's cowardice. It may be bad economics. The State is necessary to correct failures; not to declare every refusal a failure.

The BNDES's dominant presence will produce another effect: entrepreneurs will start treating access to credit as a competitive advantage. It should not be. Competitive advantage is producing better, distributing better, innovating, or operating at lower cost. Funding yourself below the competitor through institutional proximity is rent. It can enrich shareholders, but it impoverishes the country's reading. Misallocated capital does not disappear; it returns as lower productivity, higher public debt, or a future scandal.

Even so, it would be childish to wish the BNDES retreated now merely to teach the market discipline. In 2009, an abrupt withdrawal would deepen the contraction. The correct question is what gets built while the State occupies the space. If nothing is built, the next crisis will demand an even larger intervention. If standards, data, collateral, and investors are formed, the bank can reduce its presence without leaving a void.

The desirable design is a State that answers extreme fear but charges the market with the task of relearning to distinguish risks. The public guarantee should be a bridge, not an address. Subsidized funding should buy time, not dependence. The operation must remain standing when the BNDES leaves. Otherwise, we are not financing development; we are financing the inability to develop a market.

Whoever lacks the BNDES answers the fear alone. That sentence describes the problem, not the solution. The solution is allowing companies to present flows, collateral, and priorities so that other creditors can answer together. As long as the country offers architecture only to the upper floor, the cost of credit on the lower floor will keep looking like a moral punishment. It is not. It is the price of a structure that was never designed.

The State became the country's only structurer because the private market preferred the branch and politics preferred the disbursement. The crisis justified the scale. It will not justify the permanence. The true test of the BNDES will not be how much it lent in 2009, but how many markets will exist when it no longer needs to lend alone.

Leo Bentier