After a month-long run on American banks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed a Bank Holiday, beginning March 6, 1933, that shut down the banking system. When the banks reopened on March 13, depositors stood in line to return their hoarded cash. This article attributes the success of the Bank...

<i>When Washington Shut Down Wall Street</i> unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled...

[...]This article demonstrates that the Bank Holiday that beganon March 6, 1933, marked the end of an old regime, and theFireside Chat a week later inaugurated a new one. TheEmergency Banking Act of 1933, passed by Congress onMarch 9—combined with the Federal Reserve’s commitmentto supply...

At the outbreak of World War I, the biggest gold outflow in a generation posed a double-barreled threat to American finance: An internal drain of currency from the banking system and an external drain of gold to Europe. The absence of an operational central bank encouraged Treasury Secretary...

The paper describes how two types of traders, marketmakers and speculators, establish their positions and manage their risk exposure. We show that balance sheets are insufficient to determine whether a trader is a marketmaker or a speculator. On the other hand, trading records describing the...

The outbreak of World War I shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months. The conventional explanation maintains that the closure prevented a collapse in stock prices that threatened a repetition of the Panic of 1907. This paper shows that the Wilson Administration encouraged the...