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Sure although less than you’d think.Up until the 1930’s changes from the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation under Houston banker/hardware retailer Jesse Jones, banks were mostly lending to their own owners, board members, family members, and close cronies so most businesses had no real access to commercial credit. This is the basis of “character” for credit screening, even though Dun & Bradstreet credit ratings went back to the 1850’s, and in practice meant “characters I’d see at my home’s dining room table or my club” rather than proven businessmen. That turned out to be a very unreliable way to select real estate development and commercial real estate projects (easy, obvious collateral that can be repossessed, a foolish limitation on commercial lending that still retards Japan and China industry), let alone the much rarer loans for factories and sometimes production equipment with loans for working capital (operations, inventory) rare (“revolving line of credit”, “inventory flooring”, “purchase order financing” to complete contracts, and new product development/retooling had to be funded from profits or external investors.So bank failures were extremely common with this reliance on very uninformed lending to insiders (we saw this again in the 1980’s Savings and Loan Crisis where board members and cronies got enormous real estate development loans that collapsed and it remains a significant factor in commercial lending large and small.) If you relied on a bank, the unaccountable and opaque management would frequently destroy your cash parked there in deposits and checking accounts by collapsing without notice or on the other side “calling a loan” before it was due to seize your factory or business to either meet a cash crisis created by poor investing by the banker in other ventures or simply a desire to profit from your assets by easily converting them to the bankers’ own. A lot of financial services are set up to convert the ownership of assets from the people who earned them to the people who “advised” them and sold them. A woman did her PhD on the Resolution Trust Corporation and it’s successor agencies back in the 1980’s and put in book form around then (I read it in 1991) that was quite a revelation of hidden history. Later books on 19th Century-early 20th Century lending confirm that, the Bank of America grew to be a huge bank by ignoring the standard practices (for which the board then tried to fire the founder A.P. Giannini for being too fair and helpful to the customers rather than cheating them.)Before the Resolution Trust Corporation’s expansion of federal bank examiners, in 1931–1936 physical investigations by their new teams spent days in each bank reviewing all of it’s files (an auditor just takes a few samples so miss patterns and most things, it’s more “transparency theater” than a truly effective tool in my experience on all sides of those.) RTC found roughly a third of US banks were insolvent, mostly with poor management blaming external conditions, and forced them to merge with healthy banks, liquidate, restructure and change management, etc. . In Michigan the complete collapse of the state’s banks was very narrowly averted only because the three largest automakers (Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan at General Motors, and Walter Chrysler at Chrysler) had purchased and ran the 3 largest, corresponding banks in Michigan out of their own frustration with lending availability. Jesse Jones’s memoir “Fifty Four Billion Dollars” is fascinating and clearly not read by many historians of the period despite Jones running RTC from 1931–1940 and then becoming Secretary of Commerce for World War II, perhaps because he was a conservative Republican hired by Herbert Hoover.The RTC created what became the U.S. Small Business Administration which by using new federal loan guarantees reduced the risk (taking on 50–90% of the risk) and structuring new loan products such as working capital loans, highly leveraged commercial building loans that used to require 80% cash down to 10–20% down, blended loans for a factory and it’s production equipment and working capital that were/are extremely useful, export financing which is something most banks don’t understand and don’t do so that blocks most firms from foreign sales. Over many decades of using SBA tools, some banks still use none of them or only the most obvious ones like the standard 7(a) loan, banks slowwwwwwwwwwwwwly learned to lend to businesses a century or later than everyone thought they had.The advantage to older businesses of the uselessness and danger of bankers especially in the 19th Century was that it forced businesses to develop and maintain very high profit margins to cover their seasonal demand, write-offs of accounts receivables, product development, retooling, advertising, sales forces, new technologies, new facilities, foreign sales, infrastructure from rail sidings to water treatment plants, electrification, workforce training, etc…..businesses always grow faster and better when they can self-fund growth activities rather than have to convince lenders to fund what’s needed (modern examples of that growth from profits would be Microsoft, Starbucks, Nike, Koch, etc.).I’ve trained bankers, trained with bankers on collateral, credit analysis, deal structuring, been trained by senior lenders and bank owners, by SBA, set up revolving loan funds, helped with or done hundreds of loan applications since 1990 with tiny local banks up through the biggest national banks.