Well before historians interested in the economic growth of latedeveloping nations celebrated the contributions of German banks to German industrial development and other historians raised questions about how long the universal banks of the German type played the key role ascribed to them by Hilferding, Lenin and Gerschenkron, German economic commentators cast a very sober look at the historical course being taken by Germany's bankers and banking system. Not perchance, some of the most significant observations were made at the end of 1923, when a near decade of profound economic instability brought on by war, revolution and inflation was coming to its tumultuous end and the time for an effort at genuine accounting had begun.

Thus, the editor of Plutus, Georg Bernhard, in an article of December 1923, had no doubt about the fact that Germany's extraordinary economic development in the past century had:

And yet, he also felt obligated to say that ‘the majority of German banks, since they had grown beyond a certain extent, have distanced themselves further and further from the pioneering activity of their first decades’. Enterprising bankers of the old stamp had given way to administrators, and, even before the war, the initiative had been seized by ‘flexible industrialists’.