Universal Banking Failure? An Analysis of the Contrasting Responses of the Amsterdamsche Bank and the Rotterdamsche Bankvereeniging to the Dutch Financial Crisis of the 1920s

[...]This paper analyses these debates using the case study of the Netherlands in the early 1920s. The literature argues that it is during this decade that the Netherlands experienced her one and only traditional banking crisis from 1600 to the present day, and after which her short-lived experiment with a system of universal banking came to an end. By calculating an equity-deposit ratio panel for the Big Five Dutch banks, this paper attempts to measure to what degree the sector evolved to become universal and subsequently returned to functional separation. It then conducts a matched pair comparison of two similar-sized banks operating in the Netherlands in the 1920s: the Amsterdamsche Bank and the Rotterdamsche Bankvereeniging. Whilst the first escaped the crisis relatively unscathed, the second required assistance from the Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank. A new and detailed narrative of one episode of the crisis using as yet unused primary sources is developed for this comparison.[...]