Per H. Hansen

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: In 2008 and 2009 Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark, had to be supported by the Danish state due to financial distress. 10 years later, in 2018 and still with a tarnished reputation, it was revealed that Danske Bank seemed to be involved in probably the largest money laundering scandal in history. These revelations created severe legitimacy troubles for Danske Bank, and Danske Bank CEO Thomas Borgen and Chairman Ole Andersen had to leave the bank. On top of that, in June 2019 Danske Bank announced to a deeply surprised public that interim CEO, Jesper Nielsen, had been fired due to misselling of financial products. On June 26, Berlingske, a business friendly newspaper, announced in an editorial, ”Danske Bank’s rotten culture needs to go. Completely.” This was not Danske Bank’s first “Stunde Null”. In the 1920s it had been close to extinction and was taken over by the state. For the next 80 years it seemed that the bank had learned its lesson. In the postwar period it gradually climbed back to its pre-eminent position and came to be considered a conservative and well-led bank with high ethical and business standards. During the banking crisis of the early 1990s, an editorial in Børsen, a Danish business newspaper, announced “Danske Bank or Chaos”. Today, it seems, it’s Danske Bank and chaos again and there’s an urgent need to make sense of this. In this paper, I try to understand Danske Bank’s past and current troubles from a historical point of view. With inspiration from recent behavioral finance, sensemaking and uses of history scholarship, I focus on the bank’s CEOs, their image, worldviews and practices, and how these have shifted over time since 1871. I use the bank’s CEOs as a prism to understand the bank, its successes and scandals, and how society has made sense of the bank’s role through shifting institutional contexts.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: In her fascinating book “Fiction in the archives”, Natalie Zemon Davis traces how “… sixteenth century people told stories …, what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.” There is a long way from the 16th century to the financial crisis of 1931, but Davis’s question how actors make sense of the unexpected and build a coherent narrative from their immediate experience is also pertinent in the case of the 1931 crisis. As the summer of 1931 turned into fall, the reconstructed monetary and financial system re-established with so much sacrifice after World War One had ended abruptly. Capitalism seemed more challenged than ever before as the Great Depression wreaked havoc to the economic, political and social fabric of western societies. Central bankers around the world struggled to make sense of the events, and of their own role in the European crisis and of the future implications. In this paper, I trace these early attempts inside and outside of central banks to shape the understanding and memory of the failure of the Austrian Credit Anstalt, the German Danatbank and the UK’s exit from Gold in September 1931. I analyze how these early efforts of writing the history of and learning from the crisis came to shape the memory and perception of the 1931 crisis in the postwar period. By tracing these stories, and how historians and economists picked up from these narratives of the crisis, this paper contributes with a novel perspective of one of the most important financial crises in the history of capitalism.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: “Fiction In the Archives”? Writing the Early History of the European 1931 Financial Crisis. In her fascinating book Natalie Zemon Davis contrasts the way she was taught to do history as a student by peeling “away the fictive elements in our documents so we could get at the real facts” with seeking to understand how her subjects “accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.” There is a long way from Davis’s ordinary 16th century peoples’ letters of pardon to the topic of this paper that focuses on central bankers’ and economists’ explanations of the financial crisis of 1931. Nevertheless, the question of how actors made sense of and explained their world is pertinent in the case of the 1931 crisis as well. In this paper I analyze the early narrative emplotment of the European 1931 crisis in texts from the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, and two more general and publicly available texts by historian Arnold Toynbee and economist R.G. Hawtrey respectively. I then discuss this analysis in the context of the historiography of the crisis.

2026 London

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss how societies make sense of top echelon bankers during boom and bust. I argue that bankers are often construed as superstars, masters of the universe, during a boom, only to be narrated as villains when a boom turns to bust. In much economic and sociological research this post-financial crisis process is often described as harmful scapegoating distracting focus from real institutional or systemic issues. Still, the process is a fact of life, and from a cultural perspective it might be argued that it is a necessary way for societies of dealing with crisis and scandal. In this paper I zoom in on a few bankers from the interwar period to examine how the process of sensemaking unfolded before and after the bust. I focus in particular on two highly prominent bankers in their respective countries, the Danish Emil Glückstadt of Landmandsbanken, which failed in 1922, and the German Jakob Goldschmidt of the Danatbank, which failed in July 1931. This paper is a pilot for a larger book project examining eight bankers from four different countries and two time periods, the interwar period and the 2000s.