The Second Bank of the United States (1816–36) faced a potential trade-off between the private profits it was expected to produce for shareholders and the ‘free’ yet costly fiscal services it was mandated to provide to the Federal government during an era of westward expansion and primitive transportation networks. This article shows that the bank's large-scale dealings in domestic and foreign exchange transformed this potential trade-off into a positive synergy between the bank's private and public obligations. The bank was financially successful because it found a market niche – the provision of interregional and international payment services – whose exploitation had the added virtue of reducing the cost to the bank of being the Treasury's fiscal agent.

The article examines the early history of provident institutions or trustee savings banks in Ireland. Combining aggregate data and an archive-based study of one savings bank, it describes the growth and performance of this ‘institutional import’. By and large, Irish savings banks catered for the lower-middle and middle classes, not the poor as intended by the founders of the movement. The article also explains how the collapse of three savings banks in 1848 dealt savings banks in Ireland as a whole a blow from which they never really recovered.

This article provides an historical case study of the hypothesis that a currency board imparts a deflationary bias to a growing economy. The hypothesis is based on the argument that, while economic growth increases the demand for money, the expansion of the money supply in a currency board system is constrained by the balance of payments. After examining the origins, development and criticisms of the deflationary bias hypothesis, the article investigates the experience of the Philippines during its economic recovery from the devastation of the Second World War. The evidence suggests that, under the currency board arrangement then in place, deflationary pressure emerged in the manner predicted by the hypothesis.

This article traces the origins of the ‘national bank’ in the Gold Coast. It shows how the Colonial authorities perverted the demand by Africans for a special kind of bank to aid their development. The Colonial Office preferred and ensured the establishment of an orthodox institution, which had little to give with regard to Africans' demand for developmental credit. This was because it believed that such development institutions would be unhelpful to, arguably, uncreditworthy Africans. This attitude, it is argued, represented a setback to the Gold Coast's development. Either such an institution, as demanded by Africans, would have helped the colony's advance, or Africans would have learnt earlier that the concept of development was more fundamental than setting up a ‘national bank’.