It is always either funny or disconcerting to see how media people persist in quoting and repeating each other (generally using foreign news agency stuff) with categorical assertions the content of which, in knowledgeable circles, at least, is always still very much under debate.

The article ‘No exposed Maltese banks in Italy bailout (December 27) is the latest example, referring to the Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena as being “the oldest in the world”. In my book A history of banking in Malta (Progress Press, 2006), I dealt with the highly-doubtful veracity of this assertion.

The Monte dei Paschi di Siena vies for that title with what was the Banco di Napoli. Even though sources date Monte’s creation to 1472, in its first 100 years it had quite a story of structural and corporate changes and these kept occurring even up to as late as 1995 when it transformed into a joint stock company. So today’s Monte can by no means claim to be a pure descendent of the original.

By contrast, for a long time, Banco di Napoli claimed that, since its founding in 1539, it has maintained an untainted independent lineage record totally unaffected by mergers, amalgamations or other similar corporate changes. For example, the words “the world’s oldest bank in existence” features brazenly on the front cover of their April 11, 1964 annual general meeting report.

A yet unpublished paper I wrote about the suftadja, the former Abbasid caliphate’s predecessor, by quite a few centuries, of our European inspired bill of exchange, strongly suggests that those itinerant traders too would accumulate and hoard such bills and trade in them. So, certainly, they too were engaging in forms of banking... and they were already doing so much before us Europeans! I’m very much on the lookout to see and learn whether the Chinese can make even more solid such claims.