[ad_1]
How is it possible that we do not know the names of the banks that were once the owners of life or death in the Hungarian financial world? To grow from scratch, it took not only the 150-year startup approach, which is still well known today, but also a lot of luck. What was the secret of your success and what was your biggest mistake? – this is what we follow with the help of the historical review of Otpedia.
Today, we cannot even imagine a world without banks and financial services to make our lives easier. However, in the early 19th century, in Reform-era Hungary, all of this was still lacking. The country was part of the Habsburg Empire, so economic and financial life was mainly concentrated in Vienna. There were no banks in Hungary to manage or lend their savings.
As a result, everyday life and business have encountered enormous obstacles. That is why the greatest Hungarian, István Széchenyi, fought for credit, that is why one of the demands of the 12 points of the 1848 revolution became the independent Hungarian banking world, independent of Vienna, And that is why some modern and innovative economists, merchants, and aristocrats did so much to create Hungary’s economic and financial independence.
Bank started from a workshop company
He is the first and perhaps the most famous character of the heroic era of the Hungarian banking world. the First Hungarian Savings Bank of Pest, which was established in 1839 on the initiative of András Fáy, whom his contemporaries referred to only as “the nation of everything”. It was the first financial institution in Pest, independent of the economic and political influence of Vienna, to achieve a great victory in the struggle for economic freedom.
The bank started as a “garage business” from a small room and was only open three days a week. But it developed rapidly: the spectacular industrial and economic boom of the Compromise of 1867, the Foundation period It was an inescapable financial player of the 19th century, and by the end of the century it had become a strong banking group (the social sciences call the second half of the 19th century, the last third, the turbulent era of capitalization and modernization, the fever dizzying of founding companies, “Gründerzeit”). As mentioned in common parlance, one of the people who defined “Pest Hungarian” in the first decades of the turn of the century was Károly Erney, who became a successful CEO of the bank from an intern. The famous financial institution “survived” the First World War, the Great Depression of 1929 and then the Second World War, but no longer the nationalization of the Rákosi regime.
Kossuth benches were printed here
The first financial institution was the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest, the establishment of which was reversed in 1830 in the mind of the wholesaler Móric Ullmann, but the financial institution did not start operating until 1841. Then he had an important task that made him famous: the bank printed notes known as the Kossuth Bank during the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-1849.
The bank experienced its golden age in the decades after the turn of the century. At the end of 1912, the banking group consisted of 13 members, with interests in almost a hundred major industrial companies, including the legendary Manfréd Weiss Works. Although the First World War slowed the development of the bank, it later recovered and grew enormously until the nationalization of this financial institution became the destination after the Second World War.
The magnate bank
The third major player in the heroic era of the Hungarian financial institution is the General Credit Bank of Hungary, which grew long after the liquidation of 1867. The bank began operations in 1867 and during the Gründerzeit period it was mainly engaged in the establishment of companies, credit activities and investments. In the years leading up to the First World War, it had grown into a major business empire: with its investments it was present in almost all areas of the economy and industry, and it also owned 29 other banks.
One of the bank’s wrong decisions was to take out military loans to cover the state’s war expenditures during World War I, resulting in severe financial losses. The financial institution also felt the effects of the great world economic crisis that broke out in 1929, when it was again in a bad financial situation. In addition, during World War II, it re-entered the military loan market, causing it to plummet again. In the end, this bank also could not avoid nationalization.
[ad_2]
