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.