Abstract

The Struggle for a Central Bank in Hamburg in the Middle of the 19th Century

The basic prerequisite for the development of Germany’s economic power in the middle of the 19th century was the existence of an efficient capital market organization. That there was a lack everywihere of suitable institutions which could form a reservoir of risk capital and makeit available for economic expansion was to no small extent the consequence of government banking policy. For it was attributable above all to the reserved attitude of official agencies to corporate forms of enterprise that the “association of monetary forces” only made moderate progress. The call for “banking freedom” ın the sense of private initiative without government intervention therefore became a central demand of the liberal economic policy clashed with each other, is the project for setting up a for the bulding up of the monetary and credit system in keeping with the times, in wihich fundamentally different conceptions of economic theory and economic policy clashed with each other, is the project for setting up a “Disconto-Bank” ın Hamburg in 1845. Thhe violent controversies among the merchants, the political leadership of the city state and an ever more influential public opinion regarding the establishment of this bariking institution are the subject of this study. On the one hand, far-sighted merchants wanted the benefits of a central bank, of which there were still only a few in the whole of Germany, to accelerate the circulation of money in the leading trading city on the continent. On the other hand, however, there was the pride in the supposedly unsurpassable “Girobank” dating from 1619, and a widespread antipathy to joint stock undertakings and the related exclusion of liability and depersonalization. In addition, the Senate was opposed on principle to any issue of bank notes, which was regarded as a violation of the coinage 'prerogative which. was reserved for the state alone. - The meagre results of the public subscription for shares destroyed all high expectations. Only then did the founders abstain from setting up the controversial joint-stock bank. In spite of all the optimistic agitation, it proved that capitalistic thought and action had not yet grown sufficiently strong roots in Hamburgs’ economic life.