Opening the Black Box of Financial Negotiations: The IMF, Argentina, and Brazil in the Postwar Era (1945–64)

Opening the Black Box of Financial Negotiations: The IMF, Argentina, and Brazil in the Postwar Era (1945–64) examines how international financial decisions are made when economic indicators, geopolitical interests, and formal rules alone cannot explain the outcome.

The book begins with a historical puzzle. During the early Cold War, Brazil enjoyed a considerably closer political relationship with the United States—the IMF’s largest and most influential shareholder—than Argentina did. Yet Argentina proved more successful in securing sustained IMF stabilization support. Why?

Drawing on more than 5,000 archival documents, including recently declassified IMF records alongside material from U.S., Argentine, and Brazilian archives, the book opens the “black box” of financial negotiations. It reconstructs the repeated interactions among IMF officials, national policymakers, and governments that preceded lending decisions and shows that access to international finance depended not only on economic conditions or geopolitical alignment, but also on how these actors evaluated one another over time.

At the center of the book is the concept of sentiment: the favourable or unfavourable assessments officials formed about governments, policymakers, and their prospects for implementing economic commitments. Assessments of credibility, political backing, administrative capacity, government cohesion, and past performance accumulated across successive negotiations and shaped how officials interpreted economic information and judged whether cooperation was possible.

By combining close archival reconstruction with systematic analysis of a large corpus of policy documents, the book demonstrates that these evaluations had measurable consequences for IMF programme approvals. It also shows that sentiment was neither arbitrary nor merely interpersonal: it emerged through repeated institutional interaction and became embedded in the decision-making process.

The book therefore offers a new account of the political economy of the Bretton Woods institutions. Rather than treating international financial institutions as actors responding mechanically to economic fundamentals or simply reflecting the preferences of powerful states, it shows how consequential decisions emerge from the interaction of structural power, formal institutions, and historically accumulated assessments of borrowers. In doing so, it provides a historical perspective on a question that remains central today: who gets access to international financial support, and why?