Lower Austrian farmers' bank

The Niederösterreichische Bauernbank was an Austrian financial institution founded in May 1920, which had to be intercepted by the Central Bank of the German Savings Banks in the wake of loss-making stock market speculations and whose history was dealt with by the Central Bank Committee in the wake of the collapse of the latter institute.

history

The Lower Austrian Farmers Bank was founded in 1920 with the participation of prominent figures from the Lower Austrian Farmers' Union . Governor Karl Buresch was also one of the proponents. The bank offered excessively high interest rates for deposits and so soon de facto took over the agendas of the cooperative central bank and thus the function of the central institute of the Lower Austrian Raiffeisen cooperatives , but was also forced to charge high interest rates on the credit side even after the currency stabilization. The farmer's bank also tried to appear as an aggressive competitor in the stock exchange business. According to Ausch (S 218f), she opened a branch in downtown Vienna, where “anyone could buy shares to their heart's content after a down payment of around 30 percent”. After the share price crash in the spring of 1924, however, it turned out that the shares pledged at the bank only covered a fraction of the amount of the securities loans it had granted - some of the “street customers” had even given false names and addresses. The directors and board members of the bank had participated in the speculation and owed the institute huge, de facto bad sums after the stock market crash. In May 1925, despite warnings from the previous finance minister, Viktor Kienböck , political pressure from the Ramek government under finance minister Ahrer resulted in the Centralbank taking over the farmers' bank.

literature

• Karl Ausch : When the banks fell - on the sociology of political corruption. Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1968