Fighting financial crises: learning from the past -- The New York Clearing House Association -- The start of a panic -- What the New York Clearing House did during National Vanking Era panics -- Information production and suppression and emergency liquidity -- "Too big to fail" before the Fed --...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to...