Adam Smith and Milton Friedman are famous for championing Laissez Faire, yet both supported government regulation of the banking system. In both cases their deviation from free market orthodoxy was based on a careful reading of financial history: especially Smith's reading of the Crisis of 1772...

Wars have been the main forces shaping the international trading system in the twentieth century. The early years of the twentieth century were dominated by the international gold standard. But as a result of World War I, this system was replaced by the troubled gold exchange standards of the...

The institutional arrangements governing the creation of money in the United States have changed dramatically since the Revolution. Yet beneath the surface the story of wartime money creation has remained much the same. During wars against minor powers, the government was able to fund the war by...

To cover fully the economics of war would require encyclopedia unto itself. Here I will provide brief introductions to four questions: (1) to what extent did economic forces cause America's wars, (2) after going to war, how has the United States managed the reallocation of resources, (3) how has...

This paper argues that the banking crises in the United States in the early 1930s were similar to the "twin crisesʺ -- banking and balance of payments crises -- which have occurred in developing countries in recent years. The downturn that began in 1929 undermined banks that had made risky...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Milton Friedman’s thinking about bailouts. It covers bailouts of commercial banks, shadow banks and other financial firms, manufacturing firms, governments, financial markets, and other cases where the term is commonly used. It is based on his academic...

This paper contains all of the statistical results underlying our paper "The Origin and Diffusion of Shocks to Regional Interest Rates in the United States, 1880-2002." It also contains a table of the underlying data, and a discussion of how the data was constructed. -- Interest rates ; monetary...

We present a new monthly index of the yield on junk (high yield) bonds from 1910-1955. We then use the index to reexamine some of the main debates about the financial history of the interwar years. A close look at junk bond yields: (1) strengthens the view that the decline in lending standards...

In this paper we trace the evolution of the lender of last resort doctrine - and its implementation - from the nineteenth century through the panic of 2008. We find that typically the most influential economists "fight the last war" formulating policy guidelines that would have dealt effectively...