How to Prevent a Banking Panic: the Barings Crisis of 1890
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Friday, June 21, 2013 the Failures That Ignited America's Financial
Friday, June 21, 2013 The Failures that Ignited America’s Financial Panics: A Clinical Survey Hugh Rockoff Department of Economics Rutgers University, 75 Hamilton Street New Brunswick NJ 08901 [email protected] Preliminary. Please do not cite without permission. 1 Abstract This paper surveys the key failures that ignited the major peacetime financial panics in the United States, beginning with the Panic of 1819 and ending with the Panic of 2008. In a few cases panics were triggered by the failure of a single firm, but typically panics resulted from a cluster of failures. In every case “shadow banks” were the source of the panic or a prominent member of the cluster. The firms that failed had excellent reputations prior to their failure. But they had made long-term investments concentrated in one sector of the economy, and financed those investments with short-term liabilities. Real estate, canals and railroads (real estate at one remove), mining, and cotton were the major problems. The panic of 2008, at least in these ways, was a repetition of earlier panics in the United States. 2 “Such accidental events are of the most various nature: a bad harvest, an apprehension of foreign invasion, the sudden failure of a great firm which everybody trusted, and many other similar events, have all caused a sudden demand for cash” (Walter Bagehot 1924 [1873], 118). 1. The Role of Famous Failures1 The failure of a famous financial firm features prominently in the narrative histories of most U.S. financial panics.2 In this respect the most recent panic is typical: Lehman brothers failed on September 15, 2008: and … all hell broke loose. -
The Origins and Development of Financial Markets and Institutions: from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
This page intentionally left blank The Origins and Development of Financial Markets and Institutions Collectively, mankind has never had it so good despite periodic economic crises of which the current sub-prime crisis is merely the latest example. Much of this success is attributable to the increasing efficiency of the world’s financial institutions as finance has proved to be one of the most important causal factors in economic performance. In a series of original essays, leading financial and economic historians examine how financial innovations from the seventeenth century to the present have continually challenged established institutional arr- angements forcing change and adaptation by governments, financial intermediaries, and financial markets. Where these have been success- ful, wealth creation and growth have followed. When they failed, growth slowed and sometimes economic decline has followed. These essays illustrate the difficulties of coordinating financial innovations in order to sustain their benefits for the wider economy, a theme that will be of interest to policy makers as well as economic historians. JEREMY ATACK is Professor of Economics and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and has served as co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is co-author of A New Economic View of American History (1994). LARRY NEAL is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was founding director of the European Union Center. He is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). -
History of Financial Turbulence and Crises Prof
History of Financial Turbulence and Crises Prof. Michalis M. Psalidopoulos Spring term 2011 Course description: The outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis has rekindled academic interest in the history of fi‐ nancial turbulence and crises – their causes and consequences, their interpretations by eco‐ nomic actors and theorists, and the policy responses they stimulated. In this course, we use the analytical tools of economic history, the history of economic policy‐ making and the history of economic thought, to study episodes of financial turbulence and crisis spanning the last three centuries. This broad historical canvas offers such diverse his‐ torical examples as the Dutch tulip mania of the late 17th century, the German hyperinflation of 1923, the Great Crash of 1929, the Mexican Peso crisis of 1994/5 and the most recent sub‐ prime mortgage crisis in the US. The purpose of this historical journey is twofold: On the one hand, we will explore the prin‐ cipal causes of a variety of different manias, panics and crises, as well as their consequences – both national and international. On the other hand, we shall focus on the way economic ac‐ tors, economic theorists and policy‐makers responded to these phenomena. Thus, we will also discuss bailouts, sovereign debt crises and bankruptcies, hyperinflations and global re‐ cessions, including the most recent financial crisis of 2008 and the policy measures used to address it. What is more, emphasis shall be placed on the theoretical framework with which contemporary economists sought to conceptualize each crisis, its interplay with policy‐ making, as well as the possible changes in theoretical perspective that may have been precipi‐ tated by the experience of the crises themselves. -
The Historical Role of the European Shadow Banking System in the Development and Evolution of Our Monetary Institutions
CITYPERC Working Paper Series The Historical Role of the European Shadow Banking System in the Development and Evolution of Our Monetary Institutions Israel Cedillo Lazcano CITYPERC Working Paper No. 2013-05 City Political Economy Research Centre [email protected] / @cityperc City, University of London Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB United Kingdom The Historical Role of the European Shadow Banking System in the Development and Evolution of Our Monetary Institutions Israel Cedillo Lazcano* Abstract When we hear about the 2008 Lehman Brothers crisis, immediately we relate it to the concept of “shadow banking system”; however, the credit intermediation involving lightly regulated entities and activities outside the traditional banking system are not new for the European Financial Systems, after all, many innovations developed in the past, were adopted by European nations and exported to the rest of the world (i.e. coinage and central banking), and European innovators unleashed several financial crises related to “shadowy” financial intermediaries (i.e. the Gebroeders de Neufville crisis of 1763). However, despite not many academics, legislators and regulators even agree on what “shadow banking” is, this latter does not refer exclusively to the functions of credit intermediation and maturity transformation. This concept also refers to the creation of assets such as digital media of exchange which are designed under the influence of Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics. This lack of a uniform definition of “shadow banking” has limited our regulatory efforts on key issues like the private money creation, a source of vulnerability in the financial system that, paradoxically, at the same time could result in an opportunity to renovate European institutions, heirs of the tradition of the Wisselbank and the Bank of England which, during the seventeenth century, faced monetary innovations and led the European monetary revolution that originated the current monetary and regulatory practices implemented around the world. -
Nber Working Paper Series International Borrowing
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES INTERNATIONAL BORROWING CYCLES: A NEW HISTORICAL DATABASE Graciela L. Kaminsky Working Paper 22819 http://www.nber.org/papers/w22819 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 November 2016 I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (Award No 1023681) and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (Grant No INO14-00009). I want to thank Katherine Carpenter, Samuel Mackey, Jeffrey Messina, Andrew Olenski, and Pablo Vega-García for superb research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2016 by Graciela L. Kaminsky. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. International Borrowing Cycles: A New Historical Database Graciela L. Kaminsky NBER Working Paper No. 22819 November 2016 JEL No. F30,F34,F65 ABSTRACT The ongoing slowdown in international capital flows has brought again to the attention the booms and bust cycles in international borrowing. Many suggest that capital flow bonanzas are excessive, ending in crises. One of the most frequently mentioned culprits are the cycles of monetary easing and tightening in the financial centers. More recently, the 2008 Subprime Crisis in the United States has also been blamed for the retrenchment in capital flows to both developed and developing countries. -
Financial Crises: International Dissemination and Consequences in Historical Perspective Editors Mats Larsson and Jan Ottosson
UPPSALA PAPERS IN BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL HISTORY, 2018, NO. 22 Financial crises: International dissemination and consequences in historical perspective Editors Mats Larsson and Jan Ottosson 1 © UPFBH och författarna ISSN 1104-0726 ISRN UU-EKHI-R— 14— SE Editor: Mats Larsson 2 Title Financial crises: International dissemination and consequences in historical perspective Editors Mats Larsson and Jan Ottosson CONTACT DETAILS Mats Larsson & Jan Ottosson Department of Economic History, Uppsala University Box 513 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Email: [email protected], jan [email protected] 3 Table of contents INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 5 Introductory remarks .......................................................................................................... 8 Two centuries of international financial crises — Crises types, patterns and significance....................................................................................................................... 9 Prudential supervision and international cooperation on the financial market since 1965 and its consequences for debt crises ............................... 16 The development of international financial centres and financial crises ...................................................................................................................................................... 27 Comments and discussion ............................................................................................. -
Is Our Current International Economic Environment Unusually Crisis Prone?
Is Our Current International Economic Environment Unusually Crisis Prone? Michael Bordo and Barry Eichengreen1 August 1999 1. Introduction From popular accounts one would gain the impression that our current international economic environment is unusually crisis prone. The European of 1992-3, the Mexican crisis of 1994-5, the Asian crisis of 1997-8, and the other currency and banking crises that peppered the 1980s and 1990s dominate journalistic accounts of recent decades. This “crisis problem” is seen as perhaps the single most distinctive financial characteristic of our age. Is it? Even a cursory review of financial history reveals that the problem is not new. One classic reference, O.M.W. Sprague’s History of Crises Under the National Banking System (1910), while concerned with just one country, the United States, contains chapters on the crisis of 1873, the panic of 1884, the stringency of 1890, the crisis of 1893, and the crisis of 1907. One can ask (as does Schwartz 1986) whether it is appropriate to think of these episodes as crises — that is, whether they significantly disrupted the operation of the financial system and impaired the health of the nonfinancial economy — but precisely the same question can be asked of certain recent crises.2 In what follows we revisit this history with an eye toward establishing what is new and 1 Rutgers University and University of California at Berkeley, respectively. This paper is prepared for the Reserve Bank of Australia Conference on Private Capital Flows, Sydney, 9-10 August 1999. It builds on an earlier paper prepared for the Brookings Trade Policy Forum (Bordo, Eichengreen and Irwin 1999); we thank Doug Irwin for his collaboration and support. -
Remedies for Financial Crises in the Classical and Neoclassical Literature.*
REMEDIES FOR FINANCIAL CRISES IN THE CLASSICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL LITERATURE.* by David Laidler *The paper is a revised version of a lecture given at the University of Frankfurt on May 22, 2000, and was mainly written during the author’s tenure as Stiftungsprofessur Deutsche Bundesbank at die Freie Universität Berlin. It draws heavily on earlier works of the author (Laidler 1991, 1999 and 2000) where much more extensive documentation for the positions it takes than can be incorporated here is to be found. This version owes much to conversations and/or correspondence with Charles Goodhart, Andreas Hauskrecht and Michael Parkin, who nevertheless bear no responsibility for its shortcomings.. Modern Financial Crises and their Predecessors There are, no doubt, important differences between the financial crises of the late 1990s and those that occurred in the years between the Bullionist Controversy and the Keynesian Revolution, but certain themes that played a prominent role in the Classical and Neoclassical literature on these matters also run through modern discussions.1 The first of these is the interdependence of international and domestic aspects of financial instability, and the fact that they seem to require the simultaneous application of opposing monetary remedies, stringency to right the balance of payments, and the provision of ample liquidity to restore domestic confidence. The second is whether this policy dilemma is better addressed in a monetary system guided by rules than in one subject to discretionary policy. These two issues were systematically discussed from the very beginning of the 19th century onwards, and have found a new lease of life in the 1990s when, as in earlier times, the typical financial crisis has tended to develop out of private sector excesses, rather than government profligacy. -
The Foundations of the Valuation of Insurance Liabilities
The foundations of the valuation of insurance liabilities Philipp Keller 14 April 2016 Audit. Tax. Consulting. Financial Advisory. Content • The importance and complexity of valuation • The basics of valuation • Valuation and risk • Market consistent valuation • The importance of consistency of market consistency • Financial repression and valuation under pressure • Hold-to-maturity • Conclusions and outlook 2 The foundations of the valuation of insurance liabilities The importance and complexity of valuation 3 The foundations of the valuation of insurance liabilities Valuation Making or breaking companies and nations Greece: Creative accounting and valuation and swaps allowed Greece to satisfy the Maastricht requirements for entering the EUR zone. Hungary: To satisfy the Maastricht requirements, Hungary forced private pension-holders to transfer their pensions to the public pension fund. Hungary then used this pension money to plug government debts. Of USD 15bn initially in 2011, less than 1 million remained at 2013. This approach worked because the public pension fund does not have to value its liabilities on an economic basis. Ireland: The Irish government issued a blanket state guarantee to Irish banks for 2 years for all retail and corporate accounts. Ireland then nationalized Anglo Irish and Anglo Irish Bank. The total bailout cost was 40% of GDP. US public pension debt: US public pension debt is underestimated by about USD 3.4 tn due to a valuation standard that grossly overestimates the expected future return on pension funds’ asset. (FT, 11 April 2016) European Life insurers: European life insurers used an amortized cost approach for the valuation of their life insurance liability, which allowed them to sell long-term guarantee products. -
How to Prevent a Banking Panic: the Barings Crisis of 1890
How to Prevent a Banking Panic: the Barings Crisis of 1890 Eugene N. White Rutgers University and NBER Department of Economics New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA [email protected] 175 Years of The Economist A Conference on Economics and the Media London, September 24-25, 2015 0 Since the failure of Northern Rock in the U.K. and the collapse of Baer Sterns, Lehman Brothers and AIG in the U.S. in 2007-2008, arguments have intensified over whether central banks should follow a Bagehot-style policy in a financial crisis or intervene to save a failing SIFI (systemically important financial institution). In this debate, the experience of central banks during the classical gold standard is regarded as crucially informative. Most scholars have concluded that the Bank of England eliminated panics by strictly following Walter Bagehot’s dictum in Lombard Street (1873) to lend freely at a high rate of interest on good collateral in a crisis. This paper re-examines the first major threat to British financial stability after the publication of Lombard Street, the Barings Crisis of 1890. Previous financial histories have treated it as a minor crisis, arising from a temporary liquidity problem that posed no threat to the systems of payment and settlement. However, contemporaries believed that a panic would engulf the financial system if Baring Brothers & Co., Britain’s second largest merchant/investment bank and a highly interconnected global institution, collapsed. New evidence reveals that this SIFI was a deeply insolvent bank whose true condition was obscured in the effort to halt a panic. -
Global Financial Crisis of 2007: Analysis of Origin & Assessment Of
Global financial crisis of 2007 : analysis of origin & assessment of contagion to emerging economies : lessons & challenges for financial regulation Shazia Ghani To cite this version: Shazia Ghani. Global financial crisis of 2007 : analysis of origin & assessment of contagion to emerging economies : lessons & challenges for financial regulation. Economics and Finance. Université de Grenoble, 2013. English. NNT : 2013GRENE011. tel-00987627 HAL Id: tel-00987627 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00987627 Submitted on 6 May 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 1 La crise financière de 2007 Analyse des origines et impacts macroéconomiques sur les économies émergentes. Quels sont les leçons et les défis de régulation financière ? Global Financial Crisis of 2007 Analysis of Origin & Assessment of Contagion to Emerging Economies Lessons & Challenges for Financial Regulation Présentée par Shazia GHANI Thèse dirigée par Faruk ÜLGEN 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a pleasure to thank the many people who made this thesis possible. I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor Mr ULGEN Faruk for his sound advice, his great patience, and hour‘s long attentiveness over the last three and half years for being a model of excellence in my research area. -
The Federal Reserve's Response to the Global Financial Crisis In
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute Working Paper No. 209 http://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/institute/wpapers/2014/0209.pdf Unprecedented Actions: The Federal Reserve’s Response to the Global Financial Crisis in Historical Perspective* Frederic S. Mishkin Columbia University and National Bureau of Economic Research Eugene N. White Rutgers University and National Bureau of Economic Research October 2014 Abstract Interventions by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 were generally viewed as unprecedented and in violation of the rules---notably Bagehot’s rule---that a central bank should follow to avoid the time-inconsistency problem and moral hazard. Reviewing the evidence for central banks’ crisis management in the U.S., the U.K. and France from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, we find that there were precedents for all of the unusual actions taken by the Fed. When these were successful interventions, they followed contingent and target rules that permitted pre- emptive actions to forestall worse crises but were combined with measures to mitigate moral hazard. JEL codes: E58, G01, N10, N20 * Frederic S. Mishkin, Columbia Business School, 3022 Broadway, Uris Hall 817, New York, NY 10027. 212-854-3488. [email protected]. Eugene N. White, Rutgers University, Department of Economics, New Jersey Hall, 75 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. 732-932-7363. [email protected]. Prepared for the conference, “The Federal Reserve System’s Role in the Global Economy: An Historical Perspective” at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, September 18-19, 2014.