ABSTRACT

The hegemony of the three Big Banks Like Rothschild, which led the Haute Banque (familial merchant bank houses) in the mid-nineteenth century, three huge firms, Credit Lyonnais,

Societe Generale and Comptoir National d'Escompte de Paris, have been supposed to control the banking sector in the twentieth century; they appeared as some kind of 'trusts' - exercising their grip over credit flows, attracting volumes of deposits, organizing the price of money through the strict control of interest rates offered on deposits or charged for credits, taxing every financial operation by imposing high commission rates on floating and selling equities - all the more as some informal and contractual rules were supposed to structure the profession through cartellizing pools, led by these three giants.