the world of private banking

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THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
the way for the application to the Italian case also of Goldsmith’s conceptual
instruments of a statistical-accounting nature. This made it possible, in the first
place, to show how in Italy, in the period following the emergence of the mixed
banks, the financiatial intermediation ratio indicator (FIN) was higher than that
of other industrialised countries and that there was an elevated and precocious
institutionalisation of the credit system, and that consequently the Italian case
came within the financing schema. In the second place, it showed that the increase
in the financial inter-relation ratio (FIR) was very high in the interwar period
(1914–1938), but very low in the period of industrialisation (1881–1914). Thus,
at a merely quantitative level, exploding ‘the theory that in the initial launch of
Italian industry, given the “forced” nature of the process, the overall role of finance
[…] was more important than in other periods’. Such considerations, nevertheless,
ended up by strengthening rather than undermining Gerschenkron’s theory,
confirming that the credits of the financial intermediaries, and in particular those
of the mixed banks ‘replaced others rather than augmenting them’ and that, in view
of the considerable contribution made by such credit institutes to the increase of
the FIN they must have had ‘a specific ‘qualitative’ tendency […] to foster the
industrial and economic development of the country’ between 1895 and 1913.
Nonetheless, all these studies very carefully avoided considering the role
played by private bankers both before the reorganisation of the credit system and
after the birth and consolidation of the mixed bank. References to the importance
of these economic entities had not been lacking in the past. As observed by Franco
Bonelli, in the 1920s Luigi Einaudi had already drawn attention to the role played
by the minor banks and by private bankers in enabling the major credit institutions
that emerged at the end of the last century (Banca Commerciale Italiana, Credito
Italiano) to expand their sphere of action to a clientele traditionally bound to the
private banks by relations of trust, and at times even family connections. About
thirty years ago, the same concept was confirmed by the then governor of the
Banca d’Italia, Guido Carli. The difficulty – up until very recently – of accessing
direct archive sources was for a long time a serious impediment to the progress
of such studies. Recently, however, several important steps forward have been
made, primarily thanks to a younger generation of scholars who have adopted an
R.W. Goldsmith, Financial Structure and Development (New Haven, 1969).
A.M. Biscaini Cotula and P.L. Ciocca, ‘Le struttura finanziarie: aspetti quantitativi di
lungo periodo (1870–1979)’, in F. Vicarelli (ed.), Capitale industriale e capitale finanziario:
il caso italiano (Bologna, 1979), pp. 65–75 (quotations are on pp. 67, 70 and 75).
F. Bonelli, La crisi del 1907: Una tappa dello sviluppo industriale in Italia (Turin,
1971), p. 14.
L. Einaudi, ‘Prefazione’ to M. Segre, Le banche nell’ultimo decennio con particolare
riguardo al loro sviluppo patologico nel dopoguerra (Milan, 1926), p. III.
See his preface to R. De Mattia (ed.), Banca d’Italia, I bilanci degli Istituti di
emissione italiana dal 1883 al 1936, altre serie storiche di interesse monetario e fonti
(Rome, 1967), vol. I, p. XVI.