A grim Tale

Once upon a time there was a little bank in Austria, called Creditanstalt. Like many a fable, this one has an important message for present-day readers. Unlike many fables, this one happens to be true. By 1914 Austria may no longer have been the Holy Roman Empire that dominated the known world, but it was still a major power, the assassination of whose archduke could ignite the first world war. Unfortunately the price for being on the losing side was to be stripped of many of its territories, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and parts of Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia and Russia that ...