不知道对你有没有用


English Commercial Banks and
Organizational Inertia: The Financing
of SMEs, 1944–1960
MAE BAKER
MICHAEL COLLINS
This article is a study in the strength of shared strategic beliefs
amongst leading British clearing bankers in the years following
World War II and how those common beliefs may have inhibited po-
tential for market growth. The subject of the study is the performance
of large British deposit bankswith respect to the financing of industry.
This behavior has long been criticized by economic historians as sub-
optimal and, depending on the commentator, has been presented var-
iously as evidence of entrepreneurial failure, the gentrification of the
City, social schismamongst the economic and social elite, the political
influence of City institutions, the external orientation of capital mar-
kets, or institutional sclerosis.
1 However, in earlier studies we have
offered a rational economic explanation of the banks’ behavior and
practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
2 We ar-
gue that firms adopted a type of “transaction bank” approach to corpo-
rate finance, partly as a dynamic response to long-term developments
in money markets. The banks established a set of relatively simple
rules that could assure internal organizational conformity and mini-
mize risk. The transaction bank strategy consisted of the maintenance
of a highly liquid asset portfolio (with a large proportion held in cash
or in balances and securities that could be quickly sold on the London
markets); careful screening of applicants for loans (to eliminate at the
outset high-risk borrowers and/or projects); lending only short-period
loans (typically 6–12 months) that were subject to both regular review
and immediate recall; high collateral requirements if there was a
whiff of any unusual risk (typically, the bank insisted on holding
security of equivalent value to the loan so that if default should occur
the bank would be able to recover its money); and regular monitoring
of the workings of a business client’s account.
3
A number of important consequences followed from this strategy.
First, the banks were rarely involved in providing medium- or long-
term capital funds for their business clients. Second, the banks re-
quired only the minimum of detailed information on, and minimum
involvement in, their client’s business (r
equiring balance sheet state-
ments, proof of ownership of assets, and such like, but no engagement
regarding strategy) because if the borrower was able to meet the tight
threshold requirements regarding collateral, short-period loans, etc.,
the danger to the bank’s interests was already minimal. Thus the bank
could avoid the high cost of more detailed engagement with the client
(such as site visits, appraisal of firm strategy, appraisal of new prod-
ucts, and so on). In other words, this was an arm’s length approach
in England and Wales. One important consequence was to minimize
losses on bad debt and to instill a degree of systemic stability that was
the envy of the world, not just at the turn of the twentieth century
but most obviously during the international money market troubles
of the 1930s, probably reinforcing leading bankers’ adherence to the
prevailing strategy.
4
Seen within a very long-term perspective, an important issue is
whether an industry-wide commitment to a “transaction banking”
strategy that had been developed in the competitive conditions of the
pre-1914 world was still appropriate to the 1940s and beyond—or
were the leading commercial bankers’ mental models of their “legit-
imate” market constrained unduly through their collective resolve to
hold on to the tenets of transaction banking? This is the issue explored
here. In the next section we introduce the concept of industry-wide
to corporate finance, adopted by all the leading commercial banks

没有具体名字吗？

楼主，你感觉他的这篇外文翻译怎么样？

非常有用，谢谢，正是我想要找的，谢谢了

我该怎么把求助改为感谢，以及怎么感谢给我文献的朋友呢？第一次使用，很多规矩不懂，请大家多多指教