Les enjeux du métier bancaire dans la région lilloise, entre 1850 et 1914

In the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing region, the light industries, especially textile, which was predominant, needed only short-term credit (discount and overdraft), to finance cash and working capital, and also, in Roubaix, fixed assets. Equity was indeed always rationed: the growth of the firms was financed by credit, the one of the groups was self-financed. Bankers had also to deal with the practices of family capitalism: groups maintained a mutual indebtedness, that strengthened the interdependence that was created by entangled marriages between the "big families". That is why the banking credit seems to have been less important than the informal one, to which it was always compared. The "big families" controlled regional and local banks. But did the integration of the Lille marketplace in the national banking system lead to the convergence of the banking policies? The competition of the national deposit banks, which was strengthened after 1880, drove less the regional banks to raise their safety and liquidity thresholds, than the former to adapt their strategy to local specificities: the Credit lyonnais branch in Roubaix provided personal loans as any other local bank and granted large overdrafts to the textile groups. But its success seems to have been fragile: the resistance of local and regional banks is obvious. Banque de France gave up on its own lending standards. In order to restore its portfolio and its benefits, that dropped after 1875 because of competition, it developed direct discount: it would have liked to discount the large prime commercial bills, but discounted mostly local finance paper; it tolerated it, then allowed it, and finally embarked explicitly on an "overdrafts policy" since 1909. All things considered, by borrowing more and more on the Paris marketplace, "big families" kept going the overabundance of capitals that led to the sclerosis of the regional banking system, which only favoured their interests.