There is an increasing need for a system of international lending of last resort (ILLR) to provide a safety net in the event of financial crises in vulnerable countries as financial globalization deepens and spreads. Multilateral progress to address liquidity and solvency crises has been patchy...

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...