Today the ongoing financial crisis has threatened stability of banks not only in Europe but worldwide and has grown to an economic crisis. Nobody is able to forecast how long the crisis would last and if people have gone through the valley of crisis yet. Having started with non-performing subprime loans and got a new dimension when states like Iceland or Hungary become insolvent, the volume of depreciation is enormous and could only be managed with governmental interventions. As reported, activities of lending have partly come to a standstill.

Cooperative banks are involved, too, although their original business concept is not international. But they are part of a banking network with internationally operating banks, e. g. in Austria the Österreichische Volksbanken-AG, the Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG (RZB) or in Germany the Deutsche Zentral-Genossenschaftsbank AG (DZ Bank). These central banks have to correct their assets’ values and need further equity capital from their owners or from the state. Nobody knows about the consequences of any economic intervention. What people do is to learn step by step. We would like to take advantage of a quite similar historic situation and try to find out, how cooperatives, especially banks, acted in this former time. Maybe we can learn for today and get a clearer perspective of what is going on.

The historic situation we would like to concentrate is the world economic crisis of the late 1920th, beginning 1930th, that followed the world financial crisis in the beginning 1920th. What was the experience of cooperative banks, Austrian Volksbanken as well as Raiffeisenbanken, within this period of time, how did they manage the economic problems and what were the consequences for their future? As one fact, although a large Austrian institute failed and the Credit-Anstalt was nationalized, the number of cooperative banks that collapsed was low. As further result appears a successful cooperation between cooperative banks and their young central banks. We would therefore work out what advantages came from the cooperative network. Although we concentrate on the cooperative banks in Austria we would additionally analyse the situation of other cooperative forms, e. g. consumer cooperatives or agricultural cooperatives.