General Land Credit Institution
Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 40.6 ″ N , 16 ° 21 ′ 43.3 ″ E
The Allgemeine Bodencreditanstalt (short: Bodencredit or simply "Boden") was an Austrian credit institution . The head office was at Teinfaltstrasse 8 in Vienna's 1st district, Innere Stadt .
history
The bank, founded in 1863 as the kk priv. Allgemeine Österreichische Boden-Credit-Anstalt , was a highly respected institute during the time of the Danube Monarchy , which among other things was dedicated to the financing of railway construction and mortgage credit . It administered the assets of the members of the imperial family and the nobility, took estates as mortgage collateral and issued mortgage bonds . At the turn of the century, the institute also financed the conversion of large private factories into joint stock companies and, in this context, built up a large industrial group in all areas of the monarchy under its governor Theodor von Taussig . After Taussig's death, Emperor Franz Joseph appointed Rudolf Sieghart as governor in 1910 , an extremely ambitious but controversial financial expert who at an early stage got into a clear tension with the Rothschilds. In his memoirs, the temporary CA General Director Alexander Spitzmüller noted that as early as 1910, Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild , the head of the house at the time, prophesied that Sieghart's vanity, ruthlessness and his influence on the newspapers would turn the bank he directed into very dangerous ways push and eventually ruin. Sieghart's risky policy is said to have largely immobilized the “Boden” even before the start of the First World War .
In the post-war inflation of World War I, the traditional “Boden” mortgage business practically came to a standstill. The policy of the banking house was all the more expansive from 1921 onwards. Above all, Sieghart endeavored to expand the "floor" of the Central European industrial group. However, significant problems arose in this context. The largest industrial debtor of “Boden”, the Steyr-Werke , an arms and vehicle company, was already in serious difficulties towards the end of the 1920s, and the corresponding loans had to be considered immobilized. Nevertheless, the “Boden” paid high dividends of 15 percent on its own shares for 1927 and 1928 - probably for the purpose of price maintenance.
Politically, too, the Bodencreditanstalt and its governor found themselves in a controversial and sensitive position in the 1920s. The bank was considered to be the main financier of the Heimwehr , the newspaper group controlled by Rudolf Sieghart ( Neues Wiener Tagblatt etc.) advocated a clear anti-Marxist line. In this context, a report on land sales by the Bodencreditanstalt to the (politically not closely related) municipality of Vienna on March 6, 1929 in the sensational newspaper “ Der Abend ”, known for reports from the banking community, already had a disturbing effect : The “Boden” apparently urgently needed money . Even " The Austrian Economist " of March 17, 1929, rumored that the situation of the Bodencreditanstalt was "tense".
The crisis of the Bodencreditanstalt came to a head in October 1929. The directors of the institute, including Hans Fischböck , came to Chancellor Johannes Schober's Sunday, October 6th, to tell him about the financial difficulties of their bank. He reacted quickly and decisively. He put Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild under massive pressure to take over the Bodencreditanstalt by way of a merger into the Creditanstalt . The “Boden” shareholders only received CA shares amounting to one eighth of the last market value, but a formal collapse of the venerable institute could at least be avoided. The forced merger of the de facto insolvent institute with Creditanstalt soon became one of the factors that led to the CA crisis of 1931.
The political declarations of liability for banks not owned by the state during the First Republic (for example in the case of the Central Bank of the German Savings Banks crisis or the CA crisis) were often compared with those in 2006 following the BAWAG affair . There is also a similarity with the emergency nationalizations in the context of the global financial crisis .
literature
- Peter Eigner / Peter Melichar: The end of the Boden-Credit-Anstalt in 1929 and the role of Rudolf Sieghart . In: bankruptcy . Austrian Journal of History, Volume 19, Issue 3/2008, pp. 56–114
- Karl Ausch : When the banks fell - on the sociology of political corruption Vienna 1968
- Robert Schediwy : The commercial credit cooperatives in the interwar period, in: Johann Brazda (Hrsg.): 150 Years Volksbanken in Austria Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-9500461-9-4
- Alexander Spitzmüller : "... and also has a reason to love it" (Memoirs), Vienna 1955
- Fritz Weber: Before the big crash - the crisis of the Austrian banking system in the twenties , unpublished habilitation thesis, University of Salzburg 1991
Web links
- Entry on Allgemeine Bodencreditanstalt in the Austria Forum (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )