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 Englandś willingness to offer generous assistance to the market in a crisis, combined with an elaborate system for...

When faced with a run on a "systemically important" but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate...

In this paper we survey the development of lending of last resort operations in the mid-19th century. We identify and document critical dimensions of the extension of lending of last resort functions, and also develop original empirical tests enabling us to identify such things as the emergence...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

The functioning of multi-nation monetary unions with several central banks is conditioned by many factors and considerations, such as the capacity to deal with crises, the political will and operational skill to foster financial integration and to develop a mix of rules and discretion in the...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a high interest rate in...

The author argues that the idea, that the Bank of England accepted Walter Bagehot's recommendations from around the 1870s onwards and adopted the role of lender of last resort for the British financial markets, is a misconception. The published balance sheets give this impression, but a closer...

On the basis of data from the Historical Monetary Statistics-project by Norges Bank, the present paper serves a threefold purpose. In the first place it gives an overview of financial crisis in Norway from her independence from Denmark in 1814 till present times. Secondly, historical business...

This paper finds that in 1824 and 1825 the Bank of England failed to understand the extent of its influence over economic activity and thus together with the Government made serious policy errors that led to the 1825 crisis. Specifically, I argue that the second post-war debt conversion caused a...

This dissertation will analyse the degree to which Bank of England note issues influenced the extent of credit expansion by the British banking system during the 1819-26 business cycle. The evidence presented, both theoretical and empirical, tends to suggest that such an influence did indeed...