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…
As communist countries transitioned to capitalism, numerous existing institutions lost their relevance and countries found themselves short of the institutions crucial to developing successful capitalist economies. One of these were banking institutions. Banks are important to raising and intermediating the money required by new and existing industries alike. Poland had some banks before 1989…
The history of firms like Rothschild, Barings, J.P. Morgan, and others are often interchangeable with the biographies of their founders, managing partners, and other chief executives. The work of the humble bank clerk often goes unnoticed. Yet, the growth of banking in the 19th century could not have been achieved without them, and without…
The pace of bank failures in the United States picked up in the 1980s and one of the largest of these came in 1984, when Continental Illinois had to be rescued. The bank was a Chicago lender that was growing rapidly starting from the late-1970s. Yet, this growth was driven by loans to clients…
The oil crises of the 1970s were events that reordered the global economy. Energy consuming economies, like those of the European countries after Les Trente Glorieuses (the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’), saw their strong growth suddenly grind to a halt. At the same time, energy producing regions received a windfall. The U.S. economy was a…
While not as wealthy as their late-19th century equivalents, the wealthiest Americans of the early-19th century were famous across the country. Among the more well-known of these was New York’s John Jacob Astor, who made a fortune in trade and finance. His Philadelphia equivalent was also a foreign-born merchant-turned-financier, Stephen Girard. Girard founded a…
Merchants were among the first bankers in Europe. They served their fellow merchants, financing their trade. But among the first bankers were also goldsmiths. In England particularly, they came to store money on behalf of clients in their vaults, vaults they needed for their goldsmithing business anyway. In time, some goldsmiths shed their original…
There were various towns that became significant marketplaces in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, places like Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. Other places became significant banking centers; the Tuscan cities are most notable here but Augsburg in Bavaria was another. One of the most notable banking firms in Augsburg was that of the…
Credit unions were absent in Canada at the start of the 20th century. Yet, membership of credit unions became commonplace and, in Quebec, grew to encompass the vast majority of the population by the end of the century. These institutions found a better way to serve a gap in the market for credit that…
In the United States, New Orleans was the premier banking center of the pre-Civil War South. The Civil War itself did not change this, but the situation did look bleak. Most of the city’s banks were closed or winding down after New Orleans was occupied and split from the rest of the South. There…
