Laura Stanciu, Italian multinational banking in interwar east central Europe

This article examines the interwar development of multinational investment undertaken by the most prominent Italian universal bank — Banca Commerciale Italiana — in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania, referred to here as east central Europe. It analyses the extent to which considerations concerning universal banking's development are valid in the case of Italian multinational investment in this region. The article is neither a study of the 1930s financial crisis nor an analysis of the Italian universal banking per se. Instead, it questions the implicit relationship between the fate of the activities of Banca Commerciale Italiana in east central Europe and the general problems of the universal banking system during the early 1930s. Evidence seems to suggest that the bank's withdrawal from the region, beginning in the late 1920s, was more a result of managerial shortcomings and unsound investment decisions than the crisis.