Creditanstalt

Advert of Creditanstalt's creation in Wiener Zeitung, 6 November 1855

Share certificate of the Credit-Anstalt für Handel und Gewerbe, issued 31 March 1858

The Creditanstalt was founded in 1855 by Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and his son Anselm Salomon von Rothschild, with support from Austrian finance minister Karl Ludwig von Bruck and the financial involvement of notable figures of the Austrian and Bohemian high nobility.[2] It was inspired by the Pereire brothers' Paris-based Crédit Mobilier (est. 1852), and represented a defensive move against the Pereires' aggressive expansion into Europe in competition with the long-established Rothschilds. The application presented to the Austrian imperial ministry guaranteed the initial capital subscription, with 40 percent taken by the Rothschild houses in Vienna, Frankfurt and Paris, 50 percent by prominent aristocrats (Max Egon zu Fürstenberg, Johann Adolf II. zu Schwarzenberg, Vincenz Karl von Auersperg, Otto Ferdinand von Chotek, Louis Haber von Linsberg), and 10 percent by the private Prague banking house of Leopold von Lämel.[3]

The Creditanstalt immediately became the leading bank in the Habsburg Monarchy.[4] It opened its first branch in Prague in 1856. By 1867, it had established further branches in Pest, Brno, Brașov, Lviv, and Trieste,[2] and on that year it sponsored a Hungarian affiliate, the Hungarian General Credit Bank, into which it subsequently merged its prior Pest branch.[5] In 1869 it co-founded the Austro-Ägyptische Bank in Cairo, together with the Anglo-Austrian Bank.[3] Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild, Anselm Salomon's son, took control of the Creditanstalt in 1872, and was in turn succeeded in 1911 by his son Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild.[6]

The Creditanstalt's circumstances were dramatically affected by Austria-Hungary's defeat in the First World War, its subsequent dissolution, and the formation of the First Austrian Republic. In 1919, it had to sell its operations in what had become Czechoslovakia to the Prague-based Böhmische Escompte-Bank. In 1920, its branch in Ljubljana was reorganized as a fully-fledged Yugoslav bank, the Credit Institute for Commerce and Industry (Slovene: Kreditni zavod za trgovino in industrijo.[7]^: 10 It also sold its branches in the newly formed Poland to Akcyjny Bank Hipoteczny we Lwowie and Bank Dyskontowy Warszawski in an all-shares transaction, following which it held a third of each of the two banks' capital.[8]^{: 261–262} Deprived of its international outlook, the Creditanstalt focused on the Austrian market. In 1926, it purchased the Viennese operations of Anglo-Austrian Bank which had become a British bank following recapitalisation by the Bank of England; since that transaction was structured as an exchange of shares, the Bank of England, through its British subsidiary the Anglo-International Bank, became a significant shareholder of Creditanstalt. In 1929, just at the time of Wall Street Crash and under pressure from the Austrian government led by Johann Schober, Creditanstalt purchased its distressed peer the Allgemeine Bodencreditanstalt, which itself was dragged down by its acquisition of Austria's Unionbank two years earlier.[4][9]

Burdened by the troubled legacy of its recent acquisitions, the Creditanstalt declared on 11 May 1931 that it was unable to publish its financial statements for 1930, immediately triggering panic. At that time, it represented 27 percent of the Austrian banking sector's total assets, a sum equivalent to 16 percent of the country's GDP, so that there was no option to have it absorbed by another larger banks as had been done with Unionbank in 1927 and Bodencreditanstalt in 1929.[9]^: 37 This was one of the first major bank collapses that initiated the Great Depression.[10]^: 2–3[11][12] Chancellor Otto Ender organized a rescue that entailed cost-sharing by the Austrian government, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, and the Rothschild family, rejecting nationalization plans advocated by the Social Democratic Party. Citst sold control of its Yugoslav affiliate, the Ljubljana-based Credit Institute for Commerce and Industry, to the Ljubljana City Savings Bank, the Savings Bank of the Drava Banovina, and German-Slovenian businessman August Westen.[7]^: 49 The Creditanstalt's bankruptcy and its impact in producing a global banking crisis provided a major propaganda opportunity for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in which they further blamed the Jews for German and international economic and social troubles.[6]

In 1934, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß ordered the Creditanstalt's merger with the Wiener Bankverein and the sound parts of the Niederösterreichische Escompte-Gesellschaft, as a consequence of which the bank became de facto state-owned. The merged entity took the name Österreichische Creditanstalt - Wiener Bankverein.

Following the Austrian Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938, the bank was immediately targeted for both financial and racial reasons. By that time, around 36 percent of its capital was held directly by the Austrian government, 12 percent by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 16 percent by the bank employees' pension fund, and 7 percent by the bank itself through its subsidiary österreichische Realitäten AG.[13]^: 5 On 26 March 1938 it was coerced to enter a "friendship agreement" with Deutsche Bank, by which the latter secured a presence in its board of directors.[14] Louis de Rothschild was immediately arrested and imprisoned for the losses suffered by the Austrian state when the bank had collapsed. Deprived of his position and property, he was released upon payment of $21,000,000, believed to have been the largest bail bond in history for any individual,[15] and migrated to the U.S. in 1939 after more than one year in custody.

Later in 1938, the bank was jointly taken over, without compensation, by German government holding VIAG, the Deutsche Bank,[16] and the Reichsbank, which held respectively 51 percent, 25 percent, and 12 percent of its capital.[13]^: 5[14] In 1939, its name was abbreviated to Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Its Lviv-based affiliate the Akcyjny Bank Hipoteczny was nationalized following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, and later liquidated.[8]^: 265 In April 1942, Deutsche Bank raised its ownership to 51 percent by acquiring a block of shares from VIAG.[14] During wartime, the Creditanstalt expanded its operations into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia,[4] and in Nazi-allied Bulgaria.[13]^: 5 Even though Josef Joham, its former head and still board member during the war, made contact with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the Creditanstalt in that period settled the financial issues of several Nazi concentration camps as well as the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses, like the re-establishment of Sascha-Film as Wien-Film Limited.

Following Nazi defeat in World War II, the Creditanstalt again had to refocus its activity on Austria, and was nationalized by Allied-occupied Austria by law of 28 July 1946.[13]^: 6 By 1947 it had 23 branch offices in Vienna and 9 branches in the rest of Austria, as well as three provincial affiliates, namely the Bank für Kärnten in Klagenfurt, the Bank für Tirol und Vorarlberg in Innsbruck, and the Bank für Oberösterreich und Salzburg in Linz.[13]^: 4 It became mainly a commercial bank and was involved in Austria's economy, holding stakes in important Austrian companies such as Wienerberger, Steyr-Daimler-Puch, Lenzing AG, and Semperit. From 1956 onwards, the Creditanstalt was partly privatized by issuing 40% in shares, though only 10% in common stock. From the 1970s, it restarted an international expansion into central and eastern Europe.[4] In 1975, it was the first Western bank to open a representative office in Budapest.[17]^: 238

In 1981, the former Social Democratic Minister of Finance Hannes Androsch assumed the office of a general manager, after he had left the cabinet led by Bruno Kreisky. The bank's investments into industrial interests were reduced, while the government's ownership share fell to 51%. In the 1980s, the Creditanstalt opened branches in London, New York and Hong Kong. From 1989 onwards, its international orientation towards East-Central Europe was boosted by the fall of the Iron Curtain. In 1997, Geoffrey Hoguet ceased to work for the investment bank, the last member of the Rothschild family employed in banking in Austria by then.[18]

In 1997, the Austrian government sold its majority ownership stake in Creditanstalt to Bank Austria (BA), triggering a crisis in the ruling coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Austrian People's Party - since the Creditanstalt was considered to be part of the Austrian People's Party's sphere of influence under the country's distinctive Proporz arrangement, whereas both of Bank Austria's predecessor entities, the Länderbank and the Viennese Zentralsparkasse, were associated with the political left. In 2001, Bank Austria in turn was acquired by Germany's HypoVereinsbank (HVB), which merged it with Creditanstalt in 2002 to create Bank Austria Creditanstalt (BA-CA). In 2005, HVB was taken over by Italy's UniCredit.[19] After 153 years, the Creditanstalt brand name was finally phased out in 2008, even though it survived in a property subsidiary named CA Immo.

• Arie van Hengel, General Director 1932-1936
• Joseph Joham, General Director 1936-1938, Administrator 1945-1948, General Director 1948-1959
• Erich Miksch, General Director 1959-1970
• Heinrich Treichl, General Director 1970-1981
• Hannes Androsch, General Director 1981-1988
• Guido Schmidt-Chiari, General Director 1988-1997

• Wiener Bankverein
• Länderbank
• Anglo-Austrian Bank
• Erste Group
• List of banks in Austria

• März, Eduard, Austrian Banking and Financial Policy: Credit-Anstalt at a Turning Point, 1913–1923 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984) ISBN 978-0-312-06124-1
• Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Vintage, 1980) ISBN 0-394-74478-0
• Schubert, Aurel, The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) ISBN 0-521-36537-6

• Official website
• Clippings about Creditanstalt in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW