Leendert Pieter de Neufville (Amsterdam, March 8, 1729 – Rotterdam, July 28, 1811) was a Dutch merchant and banker trading in silk, linen, and grain. His business grew quickly during the Seven Years' War. De Neufville secretly supplied the Prussian army with gunpowder. It is likely that the army's outsourcing of handling bills of exchange in commercial payment boosted his business in a sophisticated form of letters of credit, acceptance loans. His business model had similarities with the modern shadow banking system.[1]
Beginning in 1762 De Neufville became involved in melting down debased coins, no longer allowed in Prussia and Saxony,[2] with the plan to sell back the melted silver. In Spring 1763 De Neufville was party to a major speculative grain deal with the Berlin merchant banker Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky.[3] The financial crisis of July 1763 was triggered when De Neufville had to pay his obligations to Gotzkowsky.[4] De Neufville suspended payment on 3 August 1763; his list of creditors included over 100 bill counterparties, the great majority of those residing in cities outside of the Dutch Republic.[5]
- ^ Responding to a Shadow Banking Crisis: the Lessons of 1763 by S. Quinn & W. Roberds
- ^ F. von Schrötter, p. 63, 65
- ^ I. Lazcano, p. 6
- ^ Crisis Chronicles: The Commercial Credit Crisis of 1763 and Today’s Tri-Party Repo Market by James Narron and David Skeie
- ^ E.E. de Jong-Keesing (1939), p. 101-110