ABSTRACT
Economic historians continue to debate the role and influence of banks within the processes of industrialization and economic growth. None the less, agreement has been reached in these scholarly interchanges regarding the establishment of a close relationship between universal banks and industry in central Europe by the close of the nineteenth century. Indeed, there is a consensus that the purest form of universal banking developed within the economy of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It took the form of the major banks pursuing in tandem short-term deposit business with longterm engagements, the latter arising from acting as investors and stockbrokers.1 Consequently, the period from the closing decades of the Habsburg Monarchy until the forced demise of the first Austrian Republic provides a clear historical example of the mutual interaction between bank and industrial capital, revealing both the positive and negative consequences of this relationship.
