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Organisational Control and English Commercial Bank Lending to Industry in the decades before World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2010

Forrest Capie  and
Michael Collins
Forrest Capie
Affiliation:
City University Business School
Michael Collins
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Abstract

The years 1880–1914 were years of institutional growth and systemic consolidation for English banks. In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century there had been a number of crises which had affected the banks of England and Wales. Ono effect was to raise anxieties about the liquidity of bank balance sheets, including fundamental questions about the composition of lending to the private sector. In particular, the paper discusses the procedures used by the banks to minimise risk and examines some aspects of actual lending practice as it applied to the industrial regions of Britain. There are three parts to the paper. The first briefly summarises the organisational and control structures that were introduced by the large joint-stock banks to standardise lending at their numerous branches. The second section introduces a schema for the assessment and monitoring of loans, and the third discusses some of the banks' pre-1914 practices with regard to loans to industry.

Resumen

Los años 1880–1914 fueron de crecimiento institucional y de sistemática consolidación en el sector bancario inglés. A principios del siglo XIX se produjeron una serie de crisis que afectaron seriamente a los bancos de Inglaterra y Gales. Una de sus consecuencias fue generar preocupación sobre la liquidez de los bancos, planteándose simultáneamente interrogantes sobre la adecuada composición de los créditos al sector privado. El artículo examina los procedimientos utilizados por los bancos para minimizar los riesgos y estudia algunos aspectos de las prácticas crediticias que se aplicaron en las regiones más industrializadas de Gran Bretaña. En la primera parte se resume la organización y los métodos de control adoptados por las principales sociedades anónimas bancarias. La segunda presenta un esquema para la evaluación y seguimiento de los créditos. Y la tercera analiza las prácticas de los bancos en sus préstamos al sector industrial.

Type
Artículos
Information
Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 187 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Instituto Figuerola de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid 1999

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References

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