A “autonomia” do Banco Central do Brasil à luz da Constituição Federal

Abstract

The present research seeks to analyse the Supplementary Law nº 179/2021, which instituted the so-called “autonomy” or “independence” of the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), and the interaction between the legal regime instituted by it with the content of the Federal Constitution. Despite having already been the subject of a decision by the Federal Supreme Court, the legal controversies regarding the aforementioned law remain heated in the field of law and in the political and economic arenas of the country. Thus, this research is specifically dedicated to the examination of the constitutionality of the norms instituting the regime of “autonomy” of the BCB. For this, it was necessary to adopt the analytical method of legal doctrines, normative texts, and economic literature, the latter as a substrate for the interpretation of the problem posed from the perspective of Law. The research begins with the reconstruction of the historicalinstitutional phenomena of money and the central bank, reaching the current scientific paradigm regarding these concepts. Then, the current constitutional and legal attributions of the Central Bank of Brazil were described and organized into two groups, which, despite being distinct, are intimately related. The interdependence of the two groups of attributions of the BCB imposes the recognition of a single administrative regime under which both are performed, the regime of the administrative activity of economic infrastructure, which is proposed in the research. In apparent contradiction with the peculiarities of this administrative activity, it was found that the Supplementary Law nº 179/2021 transformed the BCB into an independent agency. Finally, the task of analyzing the validity of the “autonomy” entrusted to the central bank in relation to the content of the Federal Constitution, especially regarding the democratic principle, was faced. As a theoretical substrate to the judgment of constitutionality of the law, we recognize the state of “deconstitutionalizing concretization” to which the constitutional text of 1988 is submitted, marked by the hypertrophy of the symbolic function of the Constitution and the distortion of the democratic mechanisms provided for the society in its wording