2 - The banking crisis of 1930

Summary

The existence of a nationwide banking panic in November 1930 to January 1931 remains a matter of dispute. We can look in vain in the pages of the financial press for an event clearly designated as a banking panic; it was certainly not the name given to the accelerated bank suspensions in the final two months of 1930. The public had no difficulty in identifying the banking crises in 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907. The passage of time should not have dulled the recognition of a banking crisis in 1930, especially if the events in those months bore a close resemblance to what had happened earlier.

Friedman and Schwartz (1963) were the first to characterize the accelaration of bank suspensions in November–January as a banking crisis or banking panic. They assigned a causal role to those bank failures to explain why the money stock fell and why the depression deepened, thereby giving dramatic emphasis to the significance of what had happened during those three months. The banking situation in 1930 took on a new relevance. But the primary concern of Friedman and Schwartz was macroeconomic; that is, they focused on the behavior of reserve and monetary aggregates and how they might have affected total output. They were only peripherally interested in the microhistory of the banking crisis except with respect to the failure of the Bank of United States in December. No mention was made of the failure of the Tennessee investment banking house of Caldwell and Co. in November, and no attempt was made to describe the geographical incidence of the banking crisis.