Examining the regulation of banking in the United States between 1900 and the Great Depression, Eugene Nelson White shows how Congress and the state legislatures tried to strengthen the banking system by creating new institutions, rather than by changing nineteenth-century laws that perpetuated...

"Over the course of the nineteenth century, the struggles of Paris Bourse to manage counterparty risk revealed the awkward choices that face derivatives exchanges. Shortly after it was founded, the stock exchange, primarily a forward market, instituted a mutual guarantee fund to prevent broker...