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French firms carried out massive investments in the Danube Basin during the interwar period which assured the French economy and French diplomacy key positions. These investments resulted from the pooling of the resources of big investment banks and big industrial enterprises within mixed investment companies of a new kind (sort of financial capital). The fact that these positions grew weaker is not due to the intrinsic lack of resources, as often suggested, but to the difficulties of banks and industrial firms to cooperate. In some cases, the bank interrupted its collaboration, with the effect of bringing about serious financial difficulties to the controlled asset (case of Skoda). In other cases, the bank imposed its objectives, which were of financial or speculative nature, to the extent of provoking the extinction of the controlled asset (case of Steava romana). This inability to collaborate, ending in the dissolution of the financial capital, is explained by the traditional estrangement of the big banks and of the big industrial firms in France.