A significant amount of political energy was poured into the cause of breaking up American monopolies in the 1890s and 1900s. These efforts spanned industries: meatpacking, railways, and oil. Banking was also in the sights of early anti-trust activists in the United States. While deposit banking was very fractured, investment banking was concentrated in…
When money-managers were searching for an investment offering inflation protection and a shortage of commercial properties existed in early-1970s Britain, a building boom got underway. This boom would have been constrained by a lack of credit, at least if only the large UK banks had been available to provide financing. They were not the…
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was established to provide deposit insurance in the U.S. and prevent bank runs. Unlike other investors in a bank, depositors were considered innocent clients rather than investors in the bank to be subjected to losses. Similar insurance was eventually extended to the clients of brokerage firms in the U.S.,…
Even quite simple economies need money. A mere subsistence economy might function without one but before any kind of market economy develops, a medium of exchange is a necessity. If typical forms of money, like banknotes or coins, don’t exist, either in law or in practice, then an alternative is likely to develop on…
There were several banks conducting both British and Dutch business in the second half of the 18th century. A few of them failed in a financial panic in 1772-73 afflicting both countries. They existed because the financial links between the two places were substantial. After Britain became a more stable place in which to…
Timing is everything. In the mid-1820s, Greece was fighting for its independence from the Ottoman Empire. In London, the market for foreign sovereign bonds, some of them of low quality, was booming. So, Greece was able to secure borrowed money in London even when it was in the midst of a war of independence,…
The 1690s saw major developments supporting London’s role as a financial center. During that decade, the Bank of England was founded, the government was raising larger loans to fund a war against France, and the stock market was growing. The latter was driven by the founding of many new companies and initial public offerings…
The United States may have had a substantial economy well before the end of the 19th century and its international trade was sizeable too. As the century came to a close, the country’s financial system had also developed to allow it to meaningfully reduce the country’s reliance on capital from abroad. However, America’s banks…
Amsterdam was the first city in the world with an active stock market. In some respects, it was a minor market, with a small number of participants and few publicly-traded shares. However, the practices of participants and the instruments with which they traded would be surprisingly familiar to us today. Documenting the functioning of…
After the French Revolution, the advancing armies of France’s new militant republic distressed many in Europe and some fared far worse than the continent’s merchants during these years. Nonetheless, merchants and commerce were displaced by the wars that lasted more than two decades. Yet, whatever the destruction brought by the wars, the cities that…
