The Spanish wording in the title is borrowed from a book by Joseph de la Vega published in Amsterdam in 1688. The book consists of a series of dialogues between a philosopher, a merchant and a shareholder, and is usually recognised as being one of the first analytical attempts to describe the different kinds of financial operations taking place in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century. This paper tries to provide new textual evidence for a better understanding of the importance of Vega's book, both in the form of a detailed description of options and futures markets and as an appraisal of decision-making processes in a context of risk and uncertainty. It also considers some of the ethical implications of the individual strategies associated with the gambling and speculation activities taking place at that time on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

The study of the foundation of the Bouches-du-Rhône Savings Bank in 1821 provides an opportunity for observing how the local elite intended to lead the working classes into economic recovery. Their relationships with depositors was a clear evidence of their own belief in economic progress, and involved a new definition of how they would socially intervene, consisting of teaching an example of behaviour that would guarantee freedom. The underlying object was to give a liberal dimension to paid work by enabling it to ensure the independence of the poorest through savings. The nineteenth century opened up the social arena to morality and the founders of the Marseilles savings bank were acting within this perspective. As a significant institution, a savings bank constituted a tool for social control well suited to strengthening proximity power. The actual activity of a trustee of a savings bank sheds light on the way the upper classes integrated this work to its own strategies of economic and social domination.

This paper analyses the organisational make-up and financial techniques of Greek diaspora banking during its golden era in Constantinople, c. 1840–81. It is argued that this small group of bankers had a flexible style of business organisation, which included informal operations. Well embedded into the network of international high finance, these bankers facilitated the integration of Constantinople into Western European capital markets — during the early days of Western financial presence in the Ottoman Empire — by developing a cunningly ingenious, for the standards of the time and place, method for the internationalisation of the financial instruments of the internal Ottoman public debt.

This paper explores the extent and nature of ‘Penny bank’ saving in Glasgow during the second half of the nineteenth century. Penny banks existed as part of the network of philanthropic organisations in the quintessential industrial city, and they were frequented by the poorer sections of the working class – those for whom saving represented a difficult and occasionally sacrificial effort. They were a voluntary and individualist decision to engage in saving, in contrast to the mutual organisations, such as friendly and industrial welfare societies which also proliferated in this period. The enormous success of penny banks in Glasgow, and throughout the United Kingdom, is powerful evidence that a great deal of saving was happening, even amongst the poorest sections of society. Careful examination of the activities of two penny banks suggests that they operated both as short-term liquidity stores and as vehicles for longer-term and larger-amount savings.

Using the depositor records of Philadelphia's largest and oldest savings bank, this article reconstructs how transient workers during the late nineteenth century often used savings accounts to attain the economic goals of their migration. Displaying savings patterns that were active and short in duration, migrants seem to have used their accounts for targeted accumulation, eventually transferring their savings to family in their home country or withdrawing it before moving on. The existence of many such accounts conflicted with the ways in whıch savings bank officers and policy-makers had intended the institutions to be used, and eventually led to important changes in managerial practices. It is argued that the case of migrant savers illustrates the need to understand the institutional development of ‘popular banking’ within the context of broad historical changes in household social and economic strategies.

Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century experimented with a free banking system. However, the severe banking crisis experienced in 1893 poses a difficulty for proponents of free banking as they argue that such systems should be free from instability. We suggest that the few regulations that Australian banks faced were either not credible or had minimal impact on bank prudential behaviour. Using data on individual banks and the overall banking system, we go on to suggest that the 1893 banking crisis was the natural outcome of an unregulated environment. We also examine the role played by the colonial governments during the crisis.

This article examines immigrant banking in the United States as a pervasive, cross-ethnic development from its heyday during the 1880s and 1890s through its gradual decline, beginning around 1907, until the mid-1920s. Unlike traditional bankers, immigrant bankers usually operated out of other commercial enterprises, such as groceries, bakeries, saloons, booksellers, boarding houses, and pedlars' carts. Located within the economic and social fabric of immigrant neighbourhoods, these ethnic entrepreneurs were crucial financial intermediaries for new immigrants, most notably eastern and southern European immigrants, and they eventually became important investors and property holders in developing urban ethnic enclaves within American cities. As they flourished, however, operators of mainstream banks looked to expand their own business into immigrant communities. By increasing their own services and exploiting growing fears of immigrants and loan sharks, opponents of immigrant bankers passed laws that spelled the end to this important form of popular banking in the early twentieth century.

This paper investigates the private-interest and public-interest theories of regulatory change to analyse the politico-economic determinants of securities transaction taxation (STT), a fiscal tool that has been practised in most industrialised countries. Combining contrasting predictions from the two theories with political arguments used and a number of recorded economic facts from Swedish STT history during the entire twentieth century, I find that the interest-group factors related to the relative strength of taxed and subsidised groups best explain the timing of STT changes. By contrast, the distortive and fiscally insignificant STT, and the other historical evidence, reject most arguments used to justify the government tax policy in a public-interest view.