Banking crises, banking mortality and the structuring of the banking market in Switzerland, 1850–2000

The Swiss financial centre, as it developed during the twentieth century, has for a long time been presented and perceived as a singularly stable and solid environment escaping crises and restructuring. This view, promoted by the dominant actors – private banks, cantonal banks and large commercial b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Financial history review 2022-08, Vol.29 (2), p.247-270
Main Authors: Giddey, Thibaud, Mazbouri, Malik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bank failures
Banking
Banking industry
Capital losses
Collective memory
Commercial banks
Crises
Demography
Diachronic analysis
Economic crisis
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
History
International finance
Morality
Swiss banks
Transformation
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Summary:The Swiss financial centre, as it developed during the twentieth century, has for a long time been presented and perceived as a singularly stable and solid environment escaping crises and restructuring. This view, promoted by the dominant actors – private banks, cantonal banks and large commercial banks – presenting their own development, in a teleological vision, as success stories, is strongly challenged by more recent research developments. Our article deals with the evolution of banking demography in Switzerland between 1850 and 2000 and examines the exits of banking institutions from the statistics, identifying six periods of crisis and restructuring. The article proposes a new statistical series that makes it possible to scrutinise with a high level of granularity the banks that fail or are taken over, in particular by observing their category of bank and, for the period 1934–99, their size. It uses historical banking demography as a gateway to understand more broadly the phases of transformation of the financial centre. In doing so, this contribution questions the gap between the existence of significant phases of banking instability, their low importance in collective memory, and the perception of the Swiss banking sector as a model of stability. It also helps to refine our understanding of the evolution of the Swiss financial centre in general.
ISSN:0968-5650
1474-0052
DOI:10.1017/S0968565022000129