The recession of 1937–8 is often cited as illustrating the dangers of withdrawing fiscal and monetary stimulus too early in a weak recovery. Yet our understanding of this severe downturn is incomplete: existing studies find that changes in fiscal policy were small in comparison to the magnitude of the downturn and that higher reserve requirements were not binding on banks. This article focuses on a neglected change in monetary policy, the sterilization of gold inflows during 1937, and finds that it exerted a powerful contractionary force during this period. The transmission of this monetary shock to the real economy appears to have worked through lower asset (equity) prices and higher interest rates.

We examine the international propagation of the financial crisis of 2008, and compare it with that of the crisis of 1931. Both crises featured a flight to liquidity and safety. We argue that the collateral squeeze in the United States, which became intense after the failure of Lehman Brothers, was an important propagator in 2008; in 1931 the acceptances granted by London banks to central European borrowers propagated the crisis to the UK. In both crises, central banks' reserve management actions contributed to the liquidity crisis. And in both crises, the behaviour of creditors towards debtors, and the valuation of assets by creditors, were very important. However, there was a key difference between the two crises in the range and nature of assets that were regarded as liquid and safe: central banks in 2008, with no gold standard constraint, could liquefy illiquid assets on a much greater scale.

This article explores the relation between financial crises and economic discourse, focusing on the record of foreign debt crises. I identify a curious migration of discourse across social groups. Discourse that was previously proffered by bankers is now part of the production of economic ‘science’. I argue that this migration can be interpreted as an attempt to manage ‘speech-liability’.

In this article we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially compiled by Walther Hoffmann (1965). With respect to the literature, the distinguishing characteristic of our analysis is the focus on different sectors in the economy and the interpretation of the findings in the context of a two-sector growth model. We find that all sectors were affected significantly by shocks from the banking system. Interestingly, this link is the strongest in sectors with small or non-tradable-goods-producing firms, such as construction, services, transportation and agriculture. In this regard, the growth patterns in nineteenth-century Germany are similar to those in today's emerging markets.

The US recession of 1937–8 is one of the deepest on record. Yet it did not produce a global depression – quite unlike 1930. According to the standard view, this reflected an unfettering of central banking after the collapse of the international gold standard circa 1931. We challenge this view. While Germany and a couple of Central and Eastern European countries were sheltered by binding exchange controls, most countries were still constrained by their golden fetters, as our new exchange rate regime classification suggests. The underlying policy regime was surprisingly similar to that of the 1929–30 downturn. What mattered was a quick reversal in US policy in 1938 and, for many countries, a more plentiful stock of international reserves.

London's seventeenth-century goldsmiths are routinely said to have pioneered fractional-reserve banking in England by clandestinely lending coin they were supposed to store – that is, by embezzling their clients. I draw upon both contemporary testimony and contemporary English law to show that the goldsmiths were almost certainly innocent of the crime for which they are so often accused. I then go on to speculate that the myth of the embezzling goldsmith may have its roots in confusion of that crime with (1) crimes other than embezzlement of which goldsmiths were accused by their contemporaries and (2) embezzlement of stored coin not by goldsmiths but by the British crown and by some merchants' servants.

In the second half of the 1970s, following the so-called ‘Carnation Revolution’ and when a global wave of privatisations started, the Portuguese government nationalised most of the companies listed on the Lisbon Exchange. A few years later the shareholders of nationalised companies were paid indemnities. The nationalisations radically changed the Portuguese corporate scene and led to very important wealth transfers. Contrary to what is usually assumed, we conclude that this transfer was detrimental to holders of large shareholdings, but favourable to small shareholders and, on average, akin to fair compensation based on market exchange.

The structures of the banking systems in early nineteenth-century England and later nineteenth-century America were quite similar. In each the multitude of independent country or interior bankers maintained correspondent accounts with bankers in the metropolis, London and New York respectively, to hold reserves and to clear and settle financial instruments used in intercity financial transactions. In spite of such similarities in structure, the performances of the two systems were, however, rather different. Although panics were frequent and their extent widespread in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England involving numerous bank failures, there was never a nationwide paralysis of the payments system such as had become a regular event in late nineteenth-century America. This was due to the Bank of England's functioning as a de facto lender of last resort even though such a role was not explicitly recognized or acknowledged until decades later.

In 1720 Britain embarked on a project to convert a large part of the public debt into shares in the South Sea Company. Most narratives assume the Company stood to profit from an anticipated increase in the market price of its shares. Though some have noted that this assumption is incorrect, no one has yet tried to find an alternative explanation for the Company's motivation for entering into the project. In this article I argue that the Company had no need to profit directly from the conversion operation and instead saw it as an opportunity to establish dominance in the British banking industry.

For most of the twentieth century, Argentina solved the macroeconomic policy trilemma through domestic monetary sovereignty. This article illustrates how the need to finance deficits was behind Argentine sovereignty. We test the hypothesis of fiscal dominance between 1875 and the approval of the Austral Plan in 1991 and find that deficits drove money creation in the long run. The article also reveals how fiscal dominance, in a scenario of increasing currency substitution, helps to explain the dynamics of Argentine inflation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Until 2008, Ireland's banks had a solid reputation. Its two long-established banks could trace their origins back to the beginnings of joint-stock banking in 1825. Few banks of consequence had failed in the interim. The last such failure, the focus of this article, was that of the Munster Bank in 1885. That event tells us much about the history of Irish banking before recent events.

By the mid nineteenth century, German miners relied on their own job-related social insurance scheme providing them with sickness, invalidity and survivorship insurance benefits. Addressing the period from 1867 to 1913, this article investigates whether the mineworkers' insurance funds, the Knappschaften, could effectively minimise their exposure to the actuarial risk inherent in their operations – and, in fact, inherent in all such insurance schemes – by increasing the scale of pooling. Contemporary observers of the Knappschaften tended to focus on whether financial stability could be improved by exploiting economies of scale, rather than by improving the pricing techniques themselves. Evidence suggests that actuarial risk was minimised at around 5,000 contributors in a Knappschaft's pension insurance section and at about 1,000 contributors in its sickness insurance section.

Sovereign debts differ from other financial instruments because repayment ultimately depends on the issuers' willingness to pay. In turn, willingness to pay may be influenced by political, diplomatic or economic considerations. Based on an original database of Romanian bonds traded in Paris, this article shows that international diplomacy played an important role in the Romanian debt valuation.

This article undertakes a comparative study of the effects of three wars upon the French stock market. Periods of war are highly turbulent financial times and trigger multiple factors to act upon stock prices. The article presents evidence suggesting that stock price behaviour is influenced by the specific way each war is financed. Financed solely by regular long-term debt, the Franco-Prussian War exhibited stock prices that only reflected real activity. On the other hand, both world wars were partially financed by monetary creation but differed with regard to the extent of financial repression. In the case of World War II, monetary creation within a closed repressed economy led to a paradoxical, short-lived increase in stock prices. The article also examines how war affected the characteristics of the market. The Franco-Prussian War caused a durable high interest rate; World War I smoothed out most of the public services firms and increased volatility; whilst World War II affected the components of the stock market. Overall, mainly due to market values being destroyed during the world wars, the importance of the stock market in the economy decreased.