This article reinterprets the origin and evolution of the Basel Accords. We argue that the Basel I paradigm was very different from the regulatory approaches that had been applied successfully in most European countries since the Second World War. Banking systems relied on a multitude of tools including entry restrictions, liquidity rules, reserve requirements, deposit rate ceilings, lending and investment restrictions, combined with hands-on supervision and discretional interventions. By focusing exclusively on capital adequacy and credit risk, Basel I shifted attention in a very different and somewhat unexpected direction. The Basel regulations are often understood as a reaction to the bank failures of the 1970s and 1980s, but in fact their capital adequacy rules would not have prevented these failures. Indeed, even today, several of these risks are still not addressed by Basel updates, suggesting that the original and current proposals have a rather different raison d’être, placating political constituencies and banking interests.

To investigate the link between monetary reforms and prices on the art market, this article focuses on the aftermath of the Gutt plan, a monetary purge implemented in Belgium just after World War II. On the basis of an original database of close on 3,000 artworks sold between 1945 and 1951, this article shows that, following the implementation of the Gutt plan, real prices on the art market experienced a massive drop suggesting that real prices on the art market are significantly influenced by money supply.

This article studies the relationship between Bank and Treasury during the War of the Spanish Succession. It examines two new series of Exchequer bills implemented in 1707 and 1709. Far from being loans-for-rents contracts, the principal aim was to accommodate war-related pressures on the nation's monetary system by manufacturing a substitute for scarce specie. The article also shows there was a covert struggle within the financial community for access to the specie flows associated with the nation's system of public finance.

In this article we use put-call parity to show that ambiguity about ownership played a role in medieval businessmen's efforts to circumvent the Catholic Church's usury restrictions. That ambiguity created fertile ground for a financial innovation, the triple contract, that allowed some merchants to accomplish a kind of regulatory arbitrage. We also show that medieval clerics and merchants appear to have had at least an intuitive grasp of put-call parity, and that this insight shaped the Catholic Church's approach to medieval business contracts, and usury, nearly five centuries before put-call parity was described in the scholarly literature.

The Bank of England's ‘consultative document’ on Competition and Credit Control (C&CC) was published on 14 May 1971. It was a landmark occasion, representing a decisive break with the prior system of maintaining direct controls over bank lending to the private sector; the intention was now to achieve the monetary authorities’ objectives of policy via the operation of market mechanisms, notably adjustments in interest rates and open market operations. Although the ‘credit control’ aspect was, over the next few years, notably less successful than the encouragement of competition amongst the banks (where the London clearing banks previously had maintained a restrictive cartel with the support of the authorities), nevertheless the direction of travel towards a more liberal, market-based system, remained, despite a partial reversion towards a direct control system in the guise of the ‘corset’, introduced at the end of 1973, and finally laid to rest in June 1980.