The Role Of Banks In The Interwar Economy

This 1991 volume examines the financing of industry by banks and the banks' credit intermediation in industrial economies.

This book is about national economic policy responses to the Great Depression of the interwar period. Taking off from a generally liberal starting point in the 1920s, states diverged greatly in their responses. Some were daring while others remained conservative. The two groups further differed among themselves in both degree and kind. The book gives a certain shape to this messy reality by identifying broad policy patterns (paradigms), and offers an explanation of it which emphasizes the ideational disposition of policy actors while recognizing the context that limits what they can do. More specifically, it argues that the ideas held by rulers and the strategies they consequently developed regarding three major groups of interest – business, labour, and, most critically, agrarians – largely determined economic policy variation across nations.

In the decades before 1914, the City of London was the premier international financial centre. However, this position was not long maintained, other industrial nations quickly and effectively challenged the influence of Britain, and following the disruption of the world markets caused by WorldWar I and the Great Depression of the 1930s, international hegemony slipped away for ever.The relationship of bankers and industrialists has often been cited as a key factor in this decline. Critics of the banks claim that, even before World War I, there were serious deficiencies in the financial provision provided by banks to the domestic industrial sector, and that these deficiencieshandicapped Britain's competitive advantage in world markets, leading to the decline of their influence and power.This book examines these claims, and bringing to bear important new data that presents the debate in a novel and revealing framework, expounds an economic rationale for historical bank behaviour. Using a rich source of contemporary records, it presents a series of micro-economic studies intocommercial bank assets and liabilities, financial crises, bank mergers, the professionalization of banking, the organization and conduct of the industrial loan business, and the nature of bank support given to industrial clients.The result is a new, authoritative interpretation of bank-industry relations in the half-century before World War I.

First published in 1997, this book analyses some of the key economic issues facing Europe in the interwar period, against the uncertain international, political and economic background of the time. Among the subjects discussed are the legacy of the peace settlements, inflation, trade and reconstruction, international lending, depression and recovery, the position of Eastern and Central Europe, and the progress of the peripheral nations. The book contends that the peace treaties raised more problems than they solved, while the policy mistakes of the Allied powers after the First World War, and their failure to devise an adequate programme of economic and financial reconstruction, weakened the already divided continent, contributing to its disintegration.

This books explains, on the basis of archival evidence and a simple economic model, why and how the gold standard collapsed in the interwar period. It also reveals how bilateralism and dirigisme in international financial relations emerged from the collapse of the universal gold standard, and how this poisoned international relations.

What role have the financial elites in European societies and markets played over time? What was their contribution to the recent financial collapse, and how does this compare to previous crises? How have financial elites adjusted to, or influenced, the evolution of the financial system's regulatory framework over time? Financial Elites and European Banking: Historical Perspectives is a collection of essays dedicated to the European financial elites and the current debate on the role of experts within society. The ambiguities of the globalized economy over the last thirty years, epitomized by growing levels of inequality, have generated a feeling of distrust towards experts. Financial elites have become one of the most scrutinized targets of negative public opinion, triggered by the financial crisis, the high compensations enjoyed both before and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the obscure nature of their activity. Financial Elites in European Banking presents historical comparisons and country and cross-country case studies on financial elites' adaption and contribution to the transformation of regulatory and cultural context in the wake of a crisis.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

The themes of this study are the exchange rate regimes chosen by policy makers in the twentieth century, the means used to maintain these regimes, and the impact of these decisions on individual national economies and the world economy in general. The book draws heavily on new research showing the lessons and the legacy left for policy makers by the gold standard and the attempt at its resurrection in the 1920s. In examining issues such as the gold exchange standard, the gold bullion standard, the experience of floating exchange rates, the Bretton Woods arrangements, the EMS and the ERM, and the Currency Board approach, there is a conscious attempt to draw out the relevance of history for policy makers now.