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 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...

The past two decades have seen the construction of a tiered system of international liquidity provision, the first tier including those whose credit is sufficient for a swap line with the Fed, the second tier including those who can offer acceptable collateral to the Fed, and the third tier...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

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...

We identify two approaches to financial crises in the history of political economy, namely, the exogenous approach whereby financial crises are sudden events, and the endogenous approach whereby they arise from a long process. In focusing on the endogenous approach, we study the contributions by...

In the summer of 1931, the Austro-German banking crisis spread to Romania and Bulgaria. In the Romanian case, the management of the crisis confronted three types of protagonists - politicians, bankers and central bankers - and positions about the relevant attitude to adopt, in particular to...

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities -- the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) -- that provided liquidity against a range of assets during...

This paper contributes to the literature on moral hazard, lending of last resort and the political origins of banking crises. Drawing on newly accessed quantitative and qualitative archival sources the paper documents how a bank-Banco de Cataluña-formed a coalition with the Dictatorship of...

Are central bank tools effective in reaching non-banks with no access to the lender-of-last-resort facilities? Using runs on mutual funds in March 2020 as a laboratory, we show that, following the announcement of large-scale purchases, funds with higher ex ante shares of assets eligible for...