Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Mercantile Credit in Britain and America, 1700-1860 -- 2 A "System of Espionage": The Origins of the Credit-Reporting Firm -- 3 Character, Capacity, Capital: How to Be Creditworthy -- 4 Jewish Merchants and the Struggle over Transparency -- 5 Growth,...

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prelude -- 1. The Early Twentieth-Century American Thrift Movement -- 2. Precursors of a Movement -- 3. Thrift's Heyday, 1910s-1930 -- 4. Teaching Thrift in the Schools -- 5. The Philosophy of Thrift -- 6. National...

This book uncovers the extent to which government policy in mid nineteenth-century Brazil followed the interests of the all-powerful coffee growing class. The testing ground for this question is monetary and banking policy, an area in which exporters and the Brazilian government were often at...

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 --...

Manias, Panics and Crashes , is a scholarly and entertaining account of the way that mismanagement of money and credit has led to financial explosions over the centuries. Covering such topics as the history and anatomy of crises, speculative manias, and the lender of last resort, this book has...

The historical response to bank crises has always been more regulation. A pattern emerges that some may find surprising: regulation often contributes to bank instability. It suppresses competition and effective response to market changes and encourages bankers to take on additional risk. This...

As the real economy is increasingly digitalized, banking lags behind. It is thus not well placed to support the new economy. The book provides some perspective on the changes taking place, identifying the systemic weaknesses in the traditional financial infrastructure, and proposing some radical...