This paper unpacks the operation of foreign debt bondholder committees before the creation of the British Corporation of Foreign Bondholders (CFB) in 1868. I argue that many ideas about this period need to be revisited. In particular, my evidence (which uses archival work to describe market...

This paper provides a new interpretation of the early rise of rating agencies in the United States (initially known as Mercantile Agencies). We explain this American exceptionality through an inductive approach that revisits the conventional parallel with the UK. In contrast with earlier...

The collapse of Overend Gurney and the ensuing Crisis of 1866 was a turning point in British financial history. The achievement of relative stability was due to the Bank of England´s willingness to offer generous assistance to the market in a crisis, combined with an elaborate system for...

This paper offers a theory of conditionality lending in 19th-century international capital markets. We argue that ownership of reputation signals by prestigious banks rendered them able and willing to monitor government borrowing. Monitoring was a source of rent, and it led bankers to support...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries' money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the option...

The National Monetary Commission was deeply concerned with importing best practice. One important focus was the connection between the money market and international trade. It was said that Britain's lead in the market for "acceptances" originating in international trade was the basis of its...

This paper does challenge the "regulatory license" view that reliance by regulators on the output of rating agencies in the 1930s "caused" the agencies to become a central part of the fabric of the US financial system. We argue that long before the 1930s, courts began using ratings as financial...

In 1867, the "Compromise" between Austria and Hungary laid the foundation of a single currency system with a common central bank. As in today's euroland, each part of the monarchy remained sovereign in fiscal matters. Moreover, the borrowing needs of both parts of the monarchy were quite large,...

We explore the efficiency of the forward reichsmark market in Vienna between 1876 and 1914. We estimate ARIMA models of the spot exchange rate in order to forecast the one-month-ahead spot rate. In turn we compare these forecasts to the contemporaneous forward rate, i.e., the market's forecast...

The first known experiment with an exchange rate band took place in Austria- Hungary between 1896 and 1914. The rationale for introducing this policy rested on precisely those intuitions that the modern literature has emphasized: the band was designed to secure both exchange rate stability and...