IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-04817-5_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Traditional Banking Practice

In: Banking and Finance in the Arab Middle East

Author

Listed:
  • Rodney Wilson

    (University of Durham)

Abstract

The financial system of the Middle East dates back long before the advent of modern banking, which has only had a presence in the region for just over a century. As soon as a barter economy gives way to a monetary system, in which some type of specie is used for transactions purposes, a need for financial institutions inevitably arises. Several reasons can be advanced for this need. Firstly, unless all payments and receipts take place instantaneously, some individuals and businesses will end up with holdings of cash, precious metals, or whatever other monetary instruments are used for transactions purposes. These holdings can of course be hoarded, but this involves a security risk, and a cost if protective measures are taken to minimise the risk. However, if centralised deposit facilities are provided, the need for hoarding is reduced, as well as the costs involved. Most societies find it is more convenient, and cheaper, to have such facilities, and the individuals who historically specialised in this task were the moneylenders or the moneychangers.1

Suggested Citation

  • Rodney Wilson, 1983. "Traditional Banking Practice," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Banking and Finance in the Arab Middle East, chapter 1, pages 1-18, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-04817-5_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-04817-5_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-04817-5_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.