Credit Mobilier (redirected from Crédit Mobilier of America scandal)

Crédit Mobilier 

(Société Générate du Crédit Mobilier), a large French joint-stock bank established in 1852. Its founders were the Perier brothers, financiers, and Fould, a banker.

The original capital assets of Crédit Mobilier amounted to 20 million gold francs, increased in 1866 to 120 million gold francs. The Crédit Mobilier financed railroad construction on a wide scale, competing with the family bank of Rothschild, which had monopolized this field, and it participated in the establishment of industrial companies and banks in France, Germany, Austria, and a number of other European countries. The principal operations of Crédit Mobilier were the issue of and speculation in stock shares in companies it established. Napoleon III protected the shady transactions of Crédit Mobilier, using the bank for his own purposes. The bank's chiefs sought “to make themselves the owner and Napoleon the Lesser the supreme dictator of all of France's diverse industry” (K. Marx in K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 12, p. 25). As a result of stock market speculations, the bank failed in 1867 and survived only through the aid of the Bank of France. In 1871, Crédit Mobilier was liquidated. Marx exposed the speculative nature of Credit Mobilier in three articles in the New York Daily Tribune in June-July 1856 (ibid., pp. 21–37).

K. A. SHTROM