BANKING ASSOCIATION BELGRADE AND THE SERBIAN FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL ELITE BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

Expert contributions
Autor: Prof. Vesna Aleksić PhD

Summary: This paper is devoted to the analysis of a personal union between the banking and industrial capital in Serbia between the two world wars, that was reflected in the fact that the directors of given banks were also members on the boards of directors of many companies, and in turn, the most distinguished Serbian industrial magnates found their place on the boards of major monetary institutes in the country. Thus a simultaneous large-scale personal concentration of position and power was created in the hands of a small number of industrial and political representatives who were in this way gaining a significant financial, political and social influence in the new nation State. Representing, in the Kingdom, the component part of a sparse urbane middle class, this banking stratum of economic elite, although only a drop in the sea of unenlightened population, irrevocably established its links with the work of the Banking Association Belgrade. Its importance in the modernisation of Serbian and Yugoslav society was not negligible, especially in the light of the fact that bankers were actually the holders of the know-how without which no economic and financial development was possible, and thus neither an overall progress of society.

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