The heyday of the Paris market place (12/03/2007)
(...) The franc was thus a stable and reliable currency, inspiring confidence abroad. In addition, although sterling was the outstanding currency for international settlements and the Bank of England could attract large sums of foreign capital should the need arise, the Banque de France was an important factor in the working of the monetary system of the time, the gold standard, ensuring its regulation and stability. At a time of crisis or tight money, it could, as a major gold-holding institution, delay raising its discount rate and let some of its yellow metal flow towards England, or even cushion France against the effects of the crisis, make some of its gold available to the Bank of England, and cooperate with it as it did in 1907. (...)

The french financial market (12/03/2007)
(...) During the whole of the war, and until 1920, the current balance of payments was heavily in deficit. The nation’s savings, which had fallen very significantly, had to be used solely for the needs of the state and for financing reconstruction. Opinion was therefore very hostile to any return to issuing foreign securities on the Paris market, and a 1916 law prohibited all such issues not having ministerial approval, which drove foreign investors away and amounted to a de facto ban on the export of capital. (...)

Financial Innovation (12/03/2007)
(...) This did not, of course, apply to the OPEC countries that were soon to flood the international capital markets with their surpluses. In 1974 the Committee of Twenty of the IMF also proposed limiting state use of the Eurocurrency markets, but the proposal was never formally adopted. The competitive returns in the form of liquidity and high interest rates were too tempting. (...)

The Bourse and French dirigisme (12/03/2007)
(...) On the other hand, however, the internationalization of the Paris market’s official list certainly progressed more slowly than was the case on all the other major European stock markets, with the exception of Milan, where it was forbidden to quote foreign securities during the period. Thus in 1973, a year when internationalization increased greatly on the financial markets as a result of the enlargement of the EEC to include Great Britain and Denmark, the Bourse exceptionally admitted 13 new foreign securities, including 6 British (among them BP, Marks and Spencer, Phoenix) and 2 Japanese companies (Hitachi and Matsushita) thus bringing the number of Japanese companies on the list to 3 (Sony had been admitted the previous year). The new impetus this gave to Paris in 1973 was remarkable, since the list had not seen such an influx of new foreign securities since 1963–4. (...)

London and Paris as international financial centres until the depression (12/02/2007)
(...) London was always the larger, by a significant margin. There are no available statistics for themagnitude of international financial centres, especially before 1960, and, indeed, no clear criteria regarding the basis on which to rank them. Nevertheless, all the suggestive indicators for 1913, a convenient vantage point for an approximate quantitative comparison between the two centres, clearly point to London’s advantage. (...)

Comparative Financial Perspectives on Paris and London in the Twentieth Century (12/02/2007)
(...) 1 per cent in 1965 and 25 per cent in 1970, as against 4.3 and 6.8 per cent for the latter. (...)

A financial revival (12/02/2007)
(...) These views of contemporaries have been endorsed by financial historians who also see the City of London as the dominant financial centre of the pre-FirstWorldWar era, only disagreeing on the degree to which it was being challenged by others, most notably New York, Paris, and Berlin. Nevertheless, though the City of London was the most important financial centre in the world, finance did not completely dominate its activities. London remained a major port, and thus home to a host of commercial, marine, and related activities before 1914. (...)