Abstract

The paper deals with the relations between global finance and local banks, focusing in particular on a local cooperative credit institute (the BCC Chianti) that is deeply embedded in local societies and characterized by direct relations with savers. These features, and the related strong social ties based on trust and confidence, are supposed to be very important to preserve the stand of this kind of credit company facing the financial crisis of the last years. The role and the evolution of cooperative credit is argued through evidences coming from the BBC archives that include data from the 1909 till now. In a one century path of the BBC one can see both continuity and change processes. On one hand, solidarism, mutualism, cooperation, peer monitoring still orient the bank action and strategy. On the other hand, social settlement, territorial basin, professionalization, forms of governance are deeply changed. The results is a mix that seems to have some chance to resist to the "great crisis". Can this model be "exported"? If this is a "financialization" crisis, and if this crisis is strictly related to a grow of intermediation activities and to depersonalization of relations, it is not difficult to see new opportunities for a model based on direct relations with savers and on a clearer correspondence between financial and real economies. But, which spaces and which limits it is all a matter of study.