The granting of a £7,000m bilateral loan by the British government to the Republic of Ireland in October 2010 highlights the banking co-dependence of modern Anglo-Irish relations. This article provides a Bank-of-England-centred perspective on the development of Irish monetary institutions from the granting of Irish monetary independence in December 1921 to the establishment of the Central Bank of Ireland in 1943. Irrespective of unresolved Anglo-Irish political issues, the Bank of England's Irish policy during this period was based on a strict adherence to Montagu Norman's key central banking principles of co-operation, exclusiveness and political autonomy. This article identifies that the application of these principles survived both the coming to power of Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) in Southern Ireland in 1932 and the outbreak of war in 1939. This article also argues that Norman's adherence to a wider internationalist view of monetary relations played an important role in forcing the overwhelmingly Protestant and pro-union Irish commercial banks, headed by the Bank of Ireland, to come to terms with the reality of Irish monetary independence. In this context, Norman's approach to Southern Ireland parallels the transition from Empire to Commonwealth, which began to emerge in the interwar period.

For most of the twentieth century, Argentina solved the macroeconomic policy trilemma through domestic monetary sovereignty. This article illustrates how the need to finance deficits was behind Argentine sovereignty. We test the hypothesis of fiscal dominance between 1875 and the approval of the Austral Plan in 1991 and find that deficits drove money creation in the long run. The article also reveals how fiscal dominance, in a scenario of increasing currency substitution, helps to explain the dynamics of Argentine inflation in the second half of the twentieth century.

This article explores the relation between financial crises and economic discourse, focusing on the record of foreign debt crises. I identify a curious migration of discourse across social groups. Discourse that was previously proffered by bankers is now part of the production of economic ‘science’. I argue that this migration can be interpreted as an attempt to manage ‘speech-liability’.

When Adam Smith – author of Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – was elected a professor at the University of Glasgow in 1751, he also joined an annuity ‘scheme’ that was unique for its time. The Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund, as it was known, offered members of the Presbyterian Church as well as the university a choice of levels at which to contribute investment savings, ranging from 2 to 10 percent of their wages. The life-contingent benefits were in the form of a reversionary annuity to a spouse and/or lump sum death benefit to children. This article (i) describes the scheme in financial and actuarial terms, (ii) values Smith's reversionary annuity and (iii) examines the choices made by individual participants. The specific research contribution is to compile the archival data to measure the extent of insurance anti-selection and to demonstrate that debates around choice architecture, default options and auto-enrollment, which infuse the literature in the twenty-first century, were prevalent in the mid eighteenth. For the record, Adam Smith actively contributed at the highest allowed rate, but it wasn't a ‘good’ investment for him, either ex ante or ex post. As for why, one must read the article.

This article investigates the determinants of Dutch firms’ dividend policies in the twentieth century. We identify three distinct episodes and document shifts in dividend policies in the 1930s and 1980s, because firm managers cater to the changing preferences of shareholders. The first episode, prior to World War II, was characterised by dividends that were fixed contracts between shareholder and management and the payouts were mechanically determined by earnings. The second epoch of Dutch dividend policy, until the 1980s, was characterised by dividend smoothing. Dividends were still strongly related to earnings, but because of shareholder's preferences for stable dividend income, earnings changes are incorporated in dividends with a lag. Finally, dividend policy in the most recent episode is inspired by shareholder wealth maximisation, based on agency and signalling motives. In this period, dividends have become largely decoupled from earnings.

The institutional environment of Portuguese banking during the golden age years of economic growth (1950–73) has been criticised in many instances, at the time and in recent literature. Direct observers of the period as well as historians have stressed two main aspects of that environment: excessive protection of existing banks, allowing them to obtain high rents, which represented a disincentive for them to compete and innovate; excessive concentration of their activity on short-term commercial paper, thus preventing them from contributing to finance growth. There seems to be a contradiction here, however, with the high growth rates of the years 1950 to 1973. The apparent contradiction is not limited to Portugal, in fact, as rapid growth in many economies in that period occurred within a framework of heavily regulated financial systems. This is the ‘financial paradox’ of the golden age. Portugal is an interesting case in the international perspective. As in the rest of the western world, legislation repressed banking quite tightly, but banks circumvented the law and competed with each other. The signs of competition were visible mostly in two dimensions: the growth of time deposits and geographical expansion.

This article argues that the crisis in euro area government bond markets reflects the same kind of stability challenges financial intermediaries face when confronted with a negative macroeconomic shock without having access to a lender of last resort. Nineteenth-century US banks operated under such a framework and used clearing houses in times of crisis as a co-insurance mechanism against contagious runs. Their experience provides valuable lessons for the ongoing reform efforts in the euro area. The analysis reveals that most of the instruments clearing houses used in the joint production of confidence are similar to the ones euro area governments have recently decided upon, such as the establishment of the European Financial Stability Facility. This suggests that the euro area crisis response has followed best private-sector practices of crisis management. However, inherent fragilities of co-insurance mechanisms as well as the long maturity and elusive quality of government debt present a challenge in designing a sustainable solution to the crisis without compromising on the original goal of euro area governance: ensuring sound fiscal policies as a prerequisite for maintaining price stability. To meet this challenge a substantially more comprehensive economic and political union might be needed.

Insurance for damage caused by public unrest became popular in post-1918 Central Europe and proved to be a profitable business, but one that became increasingly problematic because of the role of fascist regimes in promoting civil commotion. This article addresses some of the experiences of insurance companies, especially the Munich Reinsurance Company, when trying to manage policies covering political unrest and riot in Italy, Germany and Spain between 1922 and 1941. In the case of Italy in 1922, the new fascist regime forced the insurers to pay for damages caused by the Squadri. In Germany, the insurers were forced to assume a fictitious liability for damages done to the Jews in the Pogrom of November 1938. In Spain, Franco forced the insurance companies to treat Civil War damages as a civil commotion and make payouts despite their strenuous objections. These experiences demonstrated that civil commotion insurance was most safely marketed in democracies that provided enough unrest but also law and order to make it worthwhile.

In Britain around 1900, established financial institutions for long-term savings such as life assurers, and pension funds which were just in their formative phase, did not make material allocations to publicly quoted equity markets or ordinary shares; long-established life assurers, for example, had less than 3 per cent allocated to the asset class (Baker and Collins 2003). Over the following 100 years, this picture radically changed, with equities emerging as the central asset class for many institutional investors and the term ‘the cult of (the) equity’ was coined (Scott 2002; Avrahampour 2015). As the century progressed, institutional investors superseded private individuals and became the dominant holders of British publicly quoted companies (Cheffins 2010). Despite the attractions of the asset class and their generally high returns, within a relatively short period by the end of the century, institutional equity exposure had peaked and was in decline both at life assurers and within pension funds. Here we highlight, and link together, the key actuarial (Turnbull 2017) and investing (Morecroft 2017) ideas that were influential in these developments. We also identify the main individuals who were instrumental in the application of equity investing to institutional portfolios. The article has an emphasis towards years from 1920 to 1960 when most of the changes to investment practice and actuarial theory occurred.

Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. The c.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.

This article uses historical US inflation data covering over two centuries to examine the impact of the establishment of the US Federal Reserve on average US inflation and inflation uncertainty. We find that the founding of the Fed is associated with higher average US inflation and lower inflation uncertainty. Critically, these results are not driven by the post-1980 period, where the Fed policy is characterised by the dual mandate. Other important results are that the gold standard period is associated with both lower inflation and inflation uncertainty, and that banking and stock market crises are a positive determinant of inflation uncertainty and perhaps inflation. World Wars I and II and the US Civil War are associated with both higher inflation and higher inflation uncertainty. In addition, we find that the central bank has responded to increasing inflation uncertainty in a stabilising manner in support of the Holland hypothesis.

Using individual balance sheet data from the state banks in one state that was deeply impacted by the 1893 crisis, this article presents evidence that correspondent networks played an important role in transmitting the crisis. In particular, the unexpected closure of a single large national bank in Kansas City considerably increased the probability of suspension among the state banks that were connected to it through the correspondent networks. This episode thus illustrates how contagion can spread through interbank networks and sheds new light on the nature of the 1893 crisis.

By examining the acts of the Public Notary of Haifa (1890–1915), this article shows that it was the traditional informal market of credit, run by local notables, which financially supported the development of the small-landholding-based agricultural sector of the Haifa district in late Ottoman Palestine. In seeking to ascertain what led to the success of the informal rural credit market as compared with the formal credit market, the article finds that the local notables, who acted as financial intermediaries for small landholders, enjoyed an information advantage over the banks stemming from the establishment of interlinked credit market transactions connected to the stipulation of bay' wafā, salam and muzara‘ah contracts. In a context of land privatisation and growing commercialisation of agriculture, these contracts became the instruments used by notables to invest in peasants' landholdings and to manage a sales network for agricultural products on a local and international scale, hence representing an efficient financial institution to support the ‘agricultural export-led growth’ of late Ottoman Palestine.

The shortcomings and potential dangers of international financial flows for the health and stability of domestic banking systems in developing countries have been copiously discussed over the last decades. While the importance of capital controls and regulation as determining factors has been widely emphasised, the extent to which these policies work in episodes of financial crisis is still a matter of debate. This article examines the relationship between supervisory frameworks and banking fragility in Mexico and Brazil in the wake of the international debt crisis of 1982. It shows that the model of international banking intermediation that evolved out of the stringent capital mobility system in Brazil was considerably less vulnerable to crisis than in Mexico, which had a more lightly regulated regime. These findings provide insights into historical debates about the implications of prudential regulation and capital controls for the development and expansion of foreign finance, and whether the risks underlying international banking are necessarily inherent in the process of financial globalisation.

In spite of considerable attention granted to sovereign debt failures, we still have limited knowledge of the incentives which induced creditors to lend at unsustainable levels. This article looks at the French government’s policy towards Poland from 1958, when economic cooperation between the two countries started, until Poland's announcement in 1981 that it could not service its debt. Export credit guarantees supported France's financial involvement, and this implied the government's strong influence on the decision to lend. This article brings out the tension between economic and political priorities in French policymaking during the cold war. Archival evidence reveals that as early as 1975 the French finance ministry warned that French risks were excessive; that Poland’s growing economic difficulties would render the country unable to repay its debts; and recommended limiting France's financial commitments. The French government, however, decided not only to carry on but also to increase lending, in order to support its political objective of using economic and financial means to relax East–West tensions. This article illustrates how creditors play a part in sovereign debt crises by voluntarily turning a blind eye to a country’s growing inability to repay its debts, and thus reinforce a vicious circle of indebtedness.

This article traces the origin of too-big-to-fail policy in modern US banking to the bailout of the $1.2b Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. It describes this bailout and those of subsequent banks through that of Continental Illinois in 1984. During this period, market concentration due to interstate banking restrictions is a factor in most of the bailouts and systemic risk concerns were raised to justify the bailouts of surprisingly small banks. Finally, most of the bailouts in this period relied on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's use of the Essentiality Doctrine and Federal Reserve lending. A discussion of this doctrine is used to illustrate how legal constraints on regulators may become less constraining over time.

The City of London has long attracted much academic and popular attention. However, little research has been done on the relationship between the City and the European Economic Community in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the accession of the United Kingdom in 1973. Based on archival material from central and commercial banks in the UK and France, this article explores the relationship between the City and the EEC, from the accession of the UK to the EEC in 1973 to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which was meant to be the year of the completion of the single financial market. The article explores two areas: the influence of the City on EEC financial regulation, and how this influence was exerted. It pays particular attention to two committees chaired by the Bank of England, the City Liaison Committee and the City EEC Liaison Committee, and to British banks. The article argues that if the EEC played a part in the formalisation of British banking regulation, the City also played a key role in shaping EEC plans for financial regulation.