Sraffa's lectures on Continental banking: A preliminary appraisal

Abstract

Piero Sraffa delivered a course of lectures on Continental banking to Cambridge undergraduates in the spring term of 1929 and 1930. He wrote extensive lecture notes, from which this paper reconstructs the structure and contents of the course. Sraffa emphasised the differences between the British and Continental, particularly German, banking systems, stressing the importance of the relations between banks and industry on the Continent. He also underlined the different roles played by central banks in the two systems. The lectures are particularly interesting for the light they throw on large German banks in the 1920s and on the eve of their great crisis. The role of the allies in trying to reconstruct the German banking system after the defeat of Germany on lines which would weaken the banks' links with industry is brought into relief, as are the Allies' reduction of the Reichsbank's role as lender of last resort. Due attention is paid to the role of foreign capital in German banking in the 1920s and to the crucial impact of the drying up of this resource at the end of the 1920s.

Acknowledgment

I am very grateful to Francesco Auletta, who kindly made available to me the typed transcript of Sraffa's manuscript he had made in the Trinity College Library. Moreover, he has written the remarks, near the start of Section 2, on the formal character of the lectures; and the footnote on Irma Tivoli's handwritten transcriptions.

Notes

¹The text we possess is mostly written in Sraffa's hand. Some of it, however, is in a different hand. A simple comparison with the letters of Sraffa's mother, Irma Tivoli, reveals that she wrote what is not in her son's hand. They are pages reproducing parts of books and articles by other people, which Sraffa obviously intended to quote in the course of his lectures. Some of the copied texts—passages from a famous book by Maffeo Pantaleoni—are in Italian; others—on Saint Simon's doctrine—are in French; and still others—the American translation of Jacob Riesser's book on German universal banks—are in English. We know that Sraffa's mother visited him at the time he was working on his notes. It is thus probable that she copied the passages her son intended to use in his lectures while she was in Cambridge.

²Most of the ground covered in Sraffa's lectures would also be covered in Barrat Whale's book on German banking. In a side note to his manuscript, Sraffa refers to that book as announced to come out later in 1930. There appears not to have been any exchange between Sraffa and Whale before the book came out, however.