This paper assesses the validity of comparisons between the current financial crisis and past crises in the United States. We highlight aspects of two National Banking Era crises (the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1907) that are relevant for comparison with the Panic of 2008. In 1873,...

Towards the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, the Federal Reserve began using — or reviving — innovative tools for providing liquidity to the financial markets. This paper examines the types of tools at the disposal of the Federal Reserve System and highlights how the Federal Reserve...

This paper presents a new indicator on financial stress from 1889 to 2016 based on the reporting in five major US newspapers. This indicator provides detailed and high-frequency coverage of more than a century of financial history based on a previously untapped corpus of 35 million newspaper...

On August 11, 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 5.4% per year increase in the CPI for the third consecutive month, intensifying the ongoing debate about whether high inflation will prove temporary or more lasting. This paper seeks to inform this debate by evaluating the...

Central bank lender of last resort (LOLR) regimes are the last line of defence before governments are forced to resort to taxpayer-funded bailouts of the financial system. Yet despite this important role, along with a rich theoretical literature examining the function and design of LOLR regimes,...

The federal banking agencies—the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—supervise. They work cooperatively with banks and their remedial powers are so extensive they rarely use them. Oversight is designed to proceed through...

This paper sketches the evolution in the governance structures of railroad and industrial firms in the United States between 1850 and 1914. I describe how the largest of these corporations became controlled by salaried executives, with no board member willing to oversee manager actions....

This paper investigates the effect of bank failures on economic growth using data from 1900 to 1930, a period that predates active government stabilization policies and includes periods of banking system distress that are not coincident with recessions. Using both VAR and a...

Financial losses can have persistent effects on the financial sy stem. This paper proposes an empirical measure for the duration of these effects, S pillover P ersistence. I d ocument that Spillover Persistence is strongly correlated with financial c onditions; d uring b anking crises, Spillover...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...