The Bank for International Settlements BIS is an international financial institution which is owned by member central banks. The BIS carries out its work through its meetings, programmes and through the Basel Process, hosting international groups pursuing global financial stability and facilitating their interaction.
It also provides banking services, but only to central banks and other international organizations. International monetary cooperation started to develop tentatively in the course of the 19th century. The Bank of England again borrowed from its French counterpart and from the Hamburger Bank in and , and lent to it in return in That episode was recorded as the "war of the banks", ostensibly because of frictions between the Bank of France and the Bank of England about the transaction.
A few years later, monetary cooperation took a novel form with a series of international monetary conferences devoted to better coordination of the coinage system, even though these initiatives, like the Latin Monetary Union started in , did not extend to money other than coins, [ 8 ] and therefore involved treasury and mint officials rather than bankers.
At the Brussels Conference in , German academic Julius Wolff submitted a blueprint for an international currency that would be used for emergency lending to national central banks and would be issued by an institution based in a neutral country.
In , Italian statesman Luigi Luzzatti published an article in the Austrian Neue Freie Presse , referencing past examples of bilateral cooperation between central banks and emphasizing the need for more institutionalized cooperation at the international level. The practice of formalized central bank cooperation made unprecedented advances among allies in the course of World War I. In , the Bank of England and Bank of France made agreements on bilateral lending and established a direct telegraph line between their respective offices to facilitate communication.
