International trade in times of financial distress: How the Great Depression reshaped Banca Commerciale Italiana’s acceptance activity in New York (1926-1931)

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis has drawn immediate comparisons with the Great Depression, both causing severe disruptions to international trade. Yet, the financing of Italian trade during late 1920s and early 1930s has received relatively little attention. This article analyses a novel dataset, manually compiled from archival sources, containing city-level, high-frequency data from the New York branch of Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI-NY) between 1926 and 1931. By examining the acceptance business before and after the onset of Great Depression, the study highlights how BCI-NY reoriented its operations under financial distress. The data's granularity allows a detailed mapping of acceptance activities across cities and counterparties, providing insights into intra-year liquidity dynamics. The findings show that, across the two periods, the bank diverted its business toward foreign rather than Italian traders, offering fresh evidence on how banking crises are associated with distortions in the trade-finance business and with heterogeneous outcomes across borrowers in the short-run.