1 - The Bank Panic Experience: An Overview

Summary

Before we undertake a comprehensive narrative and analysis of the three major and two incipient banking panics of the national banking era, it may prove useful to provide a broad overview of the bank panic experience. We take bank panic experience to mean not only what happened during banking panics but also the public's perception of those events, especially outside New York where bank runs and bank failures were neither very large nor widely diffused, except in 1893.

Specific banking panics differed as to their origins, duration, the number and incidence of bank runs and bank failures, the response of the New York Clearing House (NYCH), and their real effects. Each had its own signature, as it were, differentiating it from the others. With due respect to those differences, we can still attempt to construct a general profile of what happened both in New York and the interior. Banking panics had their origins in the New York money market with the sole exception being the panic of 1893. Our knowledge of what happened in New York is on firmer ground than our knowledge of what happened outside New York. We also have a fairly clear idea about the course of each of the banking panics in the city of Chicago. But the banking panic experience in the other major cities has been unchronicled, partly from a lack of scholarly interest, and partly from the inconvenience of accessing multiple local newspaper sources.