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I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.


There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...

I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.


When worrying about surviving for hundreds of years, you need to compare with the data about how many have existed for hundreds of years and then folded anyway.

Note that the above list includes a bunch of "national banks" which were founded at the peak of "national movement" in 1800s (as "nations" started forming "national countries") — with many of them, you can't really leave a deposit and they instead regulate an economy of a country (not sure about "many", but at least National Bank of Serbia is one of those).


And Bearings Bank was founded in 1762. And made it to 1995 before imploding. Likely to survive, yes. But at least one is likely to fail over any reasonable period.


In 1941 when the Nazi government stripped German Jews of their citizenship, the Swiss authorities applied the law to German Jews living in Switzerland by declaring them stateless; when in February 1945 Swiss authorities blocked German Bank accounts held in Switzerland they declared that the German Jews were no longer stateless, but were once again German and blocked their Swiss bank accounts as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission


But I doubt Barclays is currently upholding contracts signed 200 years ago.


Benjamin Franklin's endowments to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia are still being maintained as trusts to this day.


There are hundreds of thousands of trusts being run to this day that were set up over 200 years ago, mostly to do with land.


Nintendo is over 100. There are breweries with *thousand* year leases to the British Monarchy.

Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.


Looks like many of the oldest companies in the word are indeed Japanese. Kongo Gumi, a construction firm, dates back from 578. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies


Kongō Gumi seems no longer independent though.

> In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongō_Gumi


Can you tell us more about what transformations are on the calendar?




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