Creditanstalt

Creditanstalt AG

Creditanstalt Bank corporate logo
Type	Subsidiary of Unicredit
Industry	Finance and Insurance
Founded	1855
Headquarters	Vienna, Austria
Key people	Baron Rothschild, founder
Products	Commercial banking, Investment banking, Private banking, Asset management
Revenue	€ bn (as of 2004)
Website	www.bankaustria.at/

The Creditanstalt (sometimes Credit-Anstalt^[1] or CA) was an Austrian bank. The Creditanstalt was based in Vienna, founded in 1855 as K. k. priv. Österreichische Credit-Anstalt für Handel und Gewerbe (approximately translated as: Imperial royal privileged Austrian Credit-Institute for Commerce and Industry) by the Rothschild family. Being very successful, it became the largest bank of Austria-Hungary. It declared bankruptcy on May 11, 1931. It has been said that this event resulted in a global financial crisis and ultimately the bank failures of the Great Depression.^{[2]:2–3 [3]} The bank was ultimately rescued by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Rothschilds and merged with the Wiener Bankverein, thus changing its name to Creditanstalt-Bankverein.

Following the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria, Creditanstalt-Bankverein was targeted for both financial and racial reasons. In early March 1938 Nazis threw the bank's Jewish president, Franz Rothenberg, from a moving vehicle (an incident he survived) and later demanded compensation from the imprisoned Baron Louis Rothschild for losses suffered by the Austrian state when the bank collapsed. Creditanstalt-Bankverein was later taken over by Deutsche Bank.^[4]

After World War II, the bank was nationalised and became mainly a commercial bank and highly involved in Austria's economy, holding stakes in important Austrian companies such as Wienerberger, Steyr-Daimler-Puch, Lenzing AG and Semperit.

In 1997, the state-owned shares were sold to Bank Austria (BA), resulting in a crisis in the ruling coalition between SPÖ and ÖVP, since Creditanstalt had to be considered part of the conservative sphere of influence, whereas BA with its roots as Vienna's Central Savings Bank (Zentralsparkasse) was considered standing politically left. The merger was not finished until 2002, with the creation of Bank Austria Creditanstalt, which became part of the German HypoVereinsbank (HVB) group. HVB has now been taken over by UniCredit.

References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Moessner, Richhild; Allen, William A. (December 2010). "Banking crises and the international monetary system in the Great Depression and now" (PDF). BIS Working Papers (Bank for International Settlements) (333). ISSN 10200959. http://www.bis.org/publ/work333.pdf. Retrieved 2011-07-25. 
3. ^ "Potential for black swan 'Credit Anstalt' event," Variant Perception, 10 May 2010
4. ^ MacDonogh, G. 1938: Hitler's Gamble. New York: Basic Books, 2009. p 49, 69.

Literature

• Aurel Schubert, Michael D. Bordo (ed.). The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931 (Studies in Macroeconomic History). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1992. ISBN 0-521-36537-6
• Carl E. Schorske. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage, London. 1980. ISBN 0-394-74478-0