"Bank Centrality" and Money Creation[« Centralité bancaire » et émission monétaire]

For more than one century, interlocking directorate studies have provided evidence of bank centrality in corporate networks. Many interpretations of this phenomenon have been elaborated, but none of them was conclusive. In this paper, we assume that theoretical and methodological limits have affected this literature. Firstly, two usual confusions have been to assimilate bank centrality to bank control and to study corporate networks from the perspective of a sum of links rather than the one of a whole structure. Secondly, scholars have paid attention to immediate financial relations between bank and industry, such as credit and shareholding, but not to financial intermediation and money creation. We think that economic theory of money creation is worth bringing back in. From such a theoretical perspective, bank centrality seems to be better understood as a form of collegial regulation of money creation, while the absence of such a phenomenon indicates the rise of bureaucratic regulation by central banks and global financial institutions.