The international performance of the US reinsurance industry differed sharply from other segments of the US financial services sector in the latter half of the twentieth century. Trade imbalances and loss ratios in international reinsurance business indicate that the American reinsurance industry had pronounced difficulties in getting a foothold in international markets. The dominance of the established western European reinsurance centres, which prevailed throughout the early phases of American reinsurance, continued long into the post-war period. Moreover, bilateral trade with the world's foremost reinsurance centre, London, failed to compensate for American catastrophe losses, a task maintained by reinsurers to be the key function of their international activities. London's failure to perform adequately is described by analysing the underwriting results of the period before and after Hurricane Betsy, the major American catastrophe loss of the 1960s.

This article investigates the impact of bank consolidations promoted by government policy, using data from pre-war Japan when the Ministry of Finance promoted bank consolidations through the Bank Law of 1927. We argue that policy-promoted consolidation had a positive effect on deposit growth, especially in the period when the financial system was unstable. On the other hand, it had a negative effect on profitability, particularly when there was no dominant bank among the participants or when more than two banks participated in the consolidation. Policy-promoted consolidation in such cases was likely to be accompanied by large organisational cost.

German bankers are renowned for their central position in the German model of ‘coordinated capitalism’ and for their elevated social status. Over the last 130 years, no other part of the entrepreneurial elite in Germany has displayed more power and stability. This article uses the concepts of social and human capital to explain this success and how German banking changed its patterns of recruitment, training and careers in response to general political and social trends. It also applies these concepts to the transformation of German banking from personal to managerial and, after 1970, to global capitalism. A conservative approach prevailed that integrated new demands but did so very cautiously. At the end of the twentieth century these features began to operate against German banking and weaken its international competitiveness, as the stock of specific social capital had created an inward-looking mindset.

The riddle of why the Maria Theresa dollar issued by Vienna continued in circulation for over one and a half centuries in Africa and the Middle East has never been fully explained. Contrary to common belief, the popularity of this particular silver dollar did not depend on its intrinsic content. The Maria Theresa dollar complemented other monies so well that no authority could replace it with its own currency. The circuit of the coin functioned as a buffering interface between local markets, which collected products like coffee through fractional currencies, and the international market, in which the products were traded in terms of a standard currency like sterling. The complementary role of the Maria Theresa dollar resulted from a self-organising process by markets themselves in order to stabilise transactions.