The consensus among MacGregor's biographers is that Britain in the early 1820s could hardly have suited him and his Poyais scheme better. Amid a general growth in the British economy following the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, interest rates were dropping and the British government bond, the "consol", offered rates of only 3% per annum on the London Stock Exchange. Those wanting a higher return invested in more risky foreign debt. After continental European bonds were popular in the immediate post-Waterloo years, the Latin American revolutions brought a raft of new alternatives to the London market, starting with the £2 million loan issued for Gran Colombia (incorporating both New Granada and Venezuela) in March 1822. Bonds from Colombia, Peru, Chile and others, offering interest rates as high as 6% per annum, made Latin American securities extremely popular on the London market—a trend on which a nation like the Poyais described by MacGregor would be ideally positioned to capitalise.