The article deals with Italian inter-war debts against the background of the contentious international issue of war reparations that many Allied nations wanted to link to war debt repayments. Italy, having first achieved an extremely large haircut by restructuring US and UK debts in 1925-6, defaulted in 1934, after the Lausanne conference of 1932 failed to deliver war debt forgiveness. We construct a new series of Italian foreign debt from 1925 to 1934 that is consistent with the unfolding of relevant historical events. Starting in 1926, our values are much lower than the currently available foreign debt series. The reason is that the current series do not take into account the large haircut that Finance Minister Volpi extracted from the London debt accord of 1926. Then, beginning in 1932, the values of our series exceed the currently available series because we date the formal Italian exit of the US war debt to 1934, whereas the current series dates it to 1932, at Lausanne.

Following the pioneering work of Irving Fisher, this article assesses the uncovered interest-parity (UIP) condition by comparing Indian interest and exchange rates during the 1869 to 1906 period. The Indian case provides a good example of the UIP condition, since Indian rupee and sterling bonds were simultaneously traded in the London financial market and subject to negligible default risks. Large deviations from the UIP condition arose when India suffered from pervasive levels of uncertainty about the future of its silver-based currency system. Otherwise, a relatively close correlation arises between sterling-to-rupee interest-rate differences and exchange-rate changes.

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.

The failure in 1697 of the ‘Malt Lottery’, the second lottery loan, presents a fruitful case study. From a practical point of view, it tells us three things. First, the technical features of the English state lottery loans were established for more than a century after only three experiments. Second, its two components (‘lottery’ and ‘loan’) led to an abnormally poor return for investors since its expected return was 3.91 per cent whereas its effective return was 5.84 per cent – two figures in contradiction with the 6.3 per cent advanced by Dickson (1967). Third, a most strange solution was devised to counteract the failure: delivering the unsold tickets to the Exchequer to be used as cash. From a more theoretical point of view, the condition North and Weingast (1989) advanced for a successful financial issue proves necessary but not sufficient. The Malt Lottery failed (1,763 tickets sold out of 140,000) because it did not meet the three requirements for success: its return was too low and was lower than the return on competitive assets; its reimbursement dates were uncertain; and the economic and political environment was gloomy.

This examination of America's original monetary policy as implemented by the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War finds that the extreme inflation experienced during the war resulted from a policy designed to circumvent a free-rider problem institutionalised by the Articles of Confederation, and that war news played a critical role in the behaviour of the money base over time. Furthermore, despite the extreme inflation, the inflation tax that accrued to Congress remained on the left side of the Laffer curve.

In 1918 the United States Treasury delegated to the War Finance Corporation, a newly created off-budget federal agency, the task of buying Liberty bonds and later Victory notes in an effort to stabilize prices. Bayesian vector autoregression analysis of the security purchases indicates that the WFC purchases provided statistically significant price support, and marginally lowered bond yields while the program operated. Once WFC purchases ended, war bond yields increased substantially. Between bond issues, the Treasury financed its operations, including security purchases from the WFC, by issuing short-term debt, which affected the money market interest rate. The WFC's bond purchases are found to have a positive and significant impact on the call loan rate. Thus the WFC's bond purchases twisted the yield curve.

This article analyses the success of the Bordeaux Mont-de-Piété between 1801 and 1913. This success was related to several factors. While the legislative environment was already advantageous (monopoly status for pawnbroking), the establishment prospered courtesy of the social and economic environment. There was indeed high social demand for financial aid linked to the individual needs of a population that found itself in a situation of virtual exclusion. The establishment also benefited from high repayment rates, which limited additional costs, regularly found ways to refinance its operations and took advantage of there being no people's banking system.

John Moody published his first railroad security analysis and ratings manual in April 1909. This study analyzes several current issues by looking back at Moody's original intentions for constructing a ratings system. The study analyzes whether Moody intended his ratings to reflect his private information, or rather, to serve some alternative role, as with monitoring conflicts of interests or realizing informational economies of scale. The study uses an ordinal regression approach to evaluate a set of explanatory variables, constructed from both the manual itself and the panic months of 1907, to test the potential information content of Moody's ratings. At the time of Moody's first rating system, the illiquidity of the US Treasury market forced investors to seek alternative ‘high-quality’ securities. Indeed, Moody rated 38.94 percent of railroad bonds as Aaa, and rated 85.25 percent of railroad bonds as A, Aa or Aaa in his universe of railroad bonds rated. To further test the informational content of Moody's ratings, the study pursues a structural default analysis during the panic year of 1907, which yields results that indicate that the default risk of railroad securities was quite low at the time. These results provide justification for the high overall ratings that Moody assigned to railroad securities, and thus their role as near risk-free securities. Therefore, railroad securities, and Moody's ratings, played a particularly important role in the financial system at the time.

The international performance of the US reinsurance industry differed sharply from other segments of the US financial services sector in the latter half of the twentieth century. Trade imbalances and loss ratios in international reinsurance business indicate that the American reinsurance industry had pronounced difficulties in getting a foothold in international markets. The dominance of the established western European reinsurance centres, which prevailed throughout the early phases of American reinsurance, continued long into the post-war period. Moreover, bilateral trade with the world's foremost reinsurance centre, London, failed to compensate for American catastrophe losses, a task maintained by reinsurers to be the key function of their international activities. London's failure to perform adequately is described by analysing the underwriting results of the period before and after Hurricane Betsy, the major American catastrophe loss of the 1960s.

In the last few years Keynes's investment activity, both as an individual trader and as a manager of institutions’ portfolios, has attracted attention in the specialised literature. Recently his investments on Wall Street, in particular – both on his own account (Cristiano, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2018) and on behalf of King's College, Cambridge (Chambers and Kabiri 2016) – have been analysed, and the evident connection with his theoretical analysis of the functioning of the financial markets contained in chapter 12 of The General Theory has been duly stressed. This article aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of Keynes's trading behaviour on Wall Street by providing a detailed comparison of his investment choices when he traded for himself and for King's. There are similarities, as might be expected, but also significant differences, well worth investigating. As far as the differences are concerned, one of the most striking is to be seen, for instance, in his attitude when, after a period of bull market in 1936, he had to face the spring 1937 burst of the speculative bubble and subsequent recession. Analysis of his behaviour in this specific case reveals that the event took him by surprise but his reaction differed with regard to his personal investments and the King's investments. The prevalence of a ‘buy and hold’ strategy, which, according to Chambers and Kabiri's reconstruction (2016), marked Keynes's behaviour in general (and also in this particular case) when he invested on behalf of King's, was not always his typical choice when the investments were undertaken on his own account. A tentative explanation of this result, which is also grounded on some different features characterising the two portfolios and not sufficiently investigated in previous studies, is at last provided in the article.

Offshore financial centres have attracted considerable critical attention over the past few decades as havens for lightly taxed funds that circulate outside the regulatory oversight of major financial centres. This article addresses the emergence of an offshore market in US dollars in Singapore from the late 1960s using a range of archival sources to identify the motivations of the host, participant banks and regional rivals. The development of the Asia dollar market is particularly striking because Singapore was not the most likely venue for an Asian offshore financial centre. The main regional financial centre was Hong Kong, but the Hong Kong authorities made a deliberate choice not to host an offshore market in Hong Kong, a decision that was initially supported both by the state and by incumbent banks, although the banks later changed their view as the Singapore market grew. This case thus opens up discussion of the influence market actors exert over regulators when they are engaged in regulatory arbitrage as well as regulatory competition between states. Evidence is also presented about the efforts of the Bank for International Settlements to encourage greater transparency in offshore financial centres in the 1980s.

This article considers the changing regulatory environment in which French insurance operated between the ancien régime and the post-war years. At first treated with suspicion, the state came to recognise the social benefits of insurance during the industrial revolution. The extension of regulation over different products and companies – life, marine, general – needs to be understood as a historical process in which first the benefits and then the possibilities for access to substantial financial resources came to be understood. A dual tradition of mistrust and fascination has prevailed in the French attitudes towards insurance, and this paper explores this relationship in a variety of contexts. It is suggested that the eventual nationalisation of much of the industry in 1946 was a signal of both increasing respectability and of the state's desire to offer universal coverage. The opportunity to mobilise and direct investment flows was also attractive.

This article examines the impact of organizational structure on risk taking across different lines of property insurance (fire, marine, vehicle and specialized property insurance) in Sweden from 1913 to 1939. Based on the theoretical arguments whereby the mutual organizational form has a competitive advantage in underwriting homogeneous but unknown risk distribution, while the stock organizational form is more likely to underwrite more volatile and heterogeneous risk categories, we conclude that organizational form has a significant impact on risk taking. Our empirical analysis shows that the risk taking, measured as incurred claims to anticipated losses, was on average lower among mutual insurers. When comparing across lines of insurance, the analysis shows that the mutual form was more successful in keeping down risks in fire and marine, while less so in vehicle and specialized property insurance. Stock companies mitigated the higher risk by ceding more premiums to reinsurers and by diversifying more across different lines of insurance.

Before the Panic of 1907 the large New York City banks were able to maintain the call loan market's liquidity during panics, but the rise in outside lending by trust companies and interior banks in the decade leading up the panic weakened the influence of the large banks. Creating a reliable source of liquidity and reserves external to the financial market like a central bank became obvious after the panic. In the call loan market, like the REPO market in 2008, lack of information on the identity of lenders and volume of the market hindered attempts to stop panic-related depositor withdrawals. Our new estimates of who was participating in the call loan market reveal that it did not contract after 1907; while the trust companies became less important, the New York national banks and outside lenders more than made up the difference.

While the International Debt Crisis of the early 1980s was the most severe financial crisis since World War II and while national and international banking supervision was developing at that time, little is known about the response of supervisors to the deteriorating financial environment in the years preceding the crisis. Complementing the political and business history of the international debt situation, this article aims to unravel the international banking supervision side of the question. Based on archival material from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and various central banks, the article examines how the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), then emerging as the leading forum on international banking supervision, anticipated the International Debt Crisis through the prism of ‘country risk’. The article shows that the Committee refused to recommend strict regulations in this area. It argues that members adopted this position because of the lack of good information and the difficult position of banking supervision between macroeconomic issues and individual banks’ own responsibilities, but also because of somewhat excessive faith in market mechanisms. Their discussions on country risk shed light on critical challenges of banking supervision and, thereby, on the history of banking regulation and prudential thinking.

The current literature on the causes of the Austrian financial crisis in 1931 emphasises both foreign and domestic factors. This article offers new data to analyse this issue. Its findings reinforce the importance of a domestic factor in bringing about the crisis: universal banks’ exposure to industrial enterprises, which were the universal banks’ main borrowers and creditors. During the 1920s, these industrial enterprises failed to perform well, rendering the universal banks insolvent. The Credit-Anstalt, which became an ‘acquirer of last resort’ for three other universal banks during the 1920s, was insolvent as early as 1925. The bank, however, could have avoided bankruptcy had it been spared the burden of Unionbank's non-performing assets.

This article scrutinizes the results of the mission carried out by Edwin Walter Kemmerer in Mexico during 1917. Based on unpublished materials from his private archive, as well as other Mexican archives, this article analyses the process of approval, installation and implementation of the reforms introduced by Kemmerer's mission in Mexico. It is argued that Kemmerer's work as a financial advisor for Venustiano Carranza was not a total failure, as the existing literature on the subject claims. Indeed, on the eve of Great Depression, Mexico exhibited the main institutional features of ‘Kemmererized’ countries: a central bank, the gold standard and a centralized tax system. It is also suggested that the economic knowledge brought into the country by the money doctor moulded the ideological foundation of the new financial and economic elite of revolutionary Mexico.

A previously unknown pricing anomaly existed for a few years in the late 1840s in the British government bond market, in which the larger and more liquid of two very large bonds was underpriced. None of the published mechanisms explains this phenomenon. It may be related to another pricing anomaly that existed for much of the nineteenth century in which terminable annuities were significantly underpriced relative to so-called ‘perpetual’ annuities that dominated the government bond market. The reasons for these mispricings seem to lie in the early Victorian culture, since the basic economic incentives as well as laws and institutions were essentially the familiar modern ones. This provides new perspectives on the origins and nature of modern corporate capitalism.