There is nothing like a major crisis, the collapse of several large banks, government bailouts and plummeting stock markets to shake up views on the ideal model for the financial markets. If the 1990s were characterised by the shareholders’ return mantra and the winning formula of the listed company, distrust in capitalism has been the overriding theme in the post-Lehman world. Only a couple of decades ago, many thought that alternatives to large, listed banks – such as co-operative lenders – would end up extinct; now these alternatives have acquired a new appeal.
“Ten years ago everybody was thinking that mutual banks were going to disappear; at that time everything was market oriented and what was not capitalist was bad,” says Olivier Pastré, professor of economics at the Université de Paris VIII.
