This special issue celebrates the career of Youssef Cassis. The introduction will outline his major contributions from his initial work on social characteristics of the financiers of the City of London, and their relationship with landed aristocrats and industry, through his analysis of a succession of financial centres, the comparative study of big business, the relationship between finance and politics, to his new project on the memory of financial crises. Then, we will draw on Youssef's mode of analysis to consider some of the more pressing issues in the era since the global financial crisis and the impact of Covid-19. We will consider the role of central banks, the challenge of fintech, the impact of low interest rates on inequality, savings and debt, and the potential shift in financial centres and reserve currencies with the rise of China. We will conclude by arguing that the mode of analysis developed by Cassis over his long and productive career has never been more pertinent.

This article analyses the reasons why most Latin American governments frequently defaulted on their debts during the nineteenth century. Contrary to previous works, which focused on domestic factors, I argue that supply-side factors were equally important. The regulatory framework at the London Stock Exchange prevented defaulting governments from having access to the capital market. Therefore, the implicit incentive for underwriting banks and governments was to accelerate negotiations with bondholders, particularly during periods of high liquidity. Frequently, however, settlements were short-lived. In contrast, certain merchant banks opted to delay or refuse a settlement if they judged that the risk of a renewed default was too high. In such cases, even if negotiations were extended, the final agreements were more often respected, allowing governments to improve their repayment record.

A newly collected historical database for the Helsinki Stock Exchange (HSE) is used to analyse the number and structure of listed equity securities. The analysis shows that from its establishment in October 1912 to the end of 1981, a total of 849 different stock series and related issue rights have been listed on the HSE. Of these, 206 are normal stock series and they represent 167 different companies. The two largest industries represented on the HSE during most of the analysed period are metal and manufacturing and pulp and paper industries. Together they represented more than half of the listed companies throughout most of the sample period.

The period from the 1950s to the late 1970s saw an almost uniform decline of cash-to-GDP ratios in industrial countries. A closer look at the German payment system suggests that the factor causing such a change was a shift towards cashless wage payments. In this period, in Germany, the branch network of banks expanded significantly and at the end of the period almost all economically active individuals had a current account. This change was triggered by rising wages and income. Rising wages increased the burden of weekly wage payments in cash, and rising income made the average earner more attractive for banks. Moreover, regulation and deregulation, by triggering both price and non-price competition, may also have played a role. Technological change was not an independent driver. In the 1950s, the number of giro accounts per German adult was comparable to the current situation in many developing countries. Yet, I argue that the German post-war experience does not provide a blueprint for most of these countries.

To fully understand and exploit the contents of stock exchange official price lists, an in-depth knowledge of local stock exchange regulations and practices is required. This article offers a comparative perspective on price discovery and quotation on the two most important Belgian stock exchanges, Brussels and Antwerp, from their establishment in 1801 up to the reform of 1935.

Innovations in the world of alternative finance such as online consumer lending, fund-raising platforms and cryptocurrencies are proceeding apace. In this article, we examine three historical case studies of newly emerged non-bank financial markets and discuss the possible implications for today's alternative finance markets. The first insight is that the private sector can generally be counted on to meet previously unmet needs. Moneylenders filled a gap unaddressed by the banking system of the day. Junior market IPOs provided access to funds for smaller companies that might otherwise have struggled to raise external finance. Private currencies replaced sovereign coins in transactions at various points in history. The second insight, however, is that new financial markets and instruments eventually attract the attention of regulators. Finally, these examples are a warning to industry not to take for granted that an initially laissez-faire regulatory regime precludes a stronger response at some point in the future. In all three cases, tougher regulation – in some cases even to the point of shutting down the products and markets concerned – arrived after long periods of observation and deliberation by the state.

This article examines perceptions and practices of habitual usury, a crime consisting of lending above the legal rate of interest on multiple occasions, in early nineteenth-century France using descriptions of usury trials found in the popular legal periodical the Gazette des Tribunaux. Following the French Revolution, French law legitimized lending at interest in principle, but punished ‘habitual usurers’ who ‘made a profession’ from lending above the legal limit. The decades that followed witnessed striking growth in banking, joint-stock companies and other financial institutions. Highlighting the connections between cultural constructions of the usurer and the actual processes deemed usurious, this article seeks to understand a paradox: that usury was deemed omnipresent in French society yet it was rarely prosecuted. By examining how habitual usury was defined and prosecuted in French courtrooms, this article shows how habitual usurers both validated and undermined stereotypical notions of predatory lending behavior found in popular culture of the time. Habitual usury trials also reveal the actual practices that allowed those excluded from formal financial networks to participate in the growth of capitalist relations. This article argues that the nineteenth-century obsession with the usurer can be explained by the crucial role played by usurious practices in the credit economy of the period. As such, prosecution of usury tended to focus on the character of the usury rather than the actual practice of illegal lending. This article suggests that by occasionally prosecuting particularly egregious ‘immoral’ moneylenders, the legal system and journals like the Gazette des Tribunaux worked to keep credit accessible to the ‘underbanked’.

After Southern Italy became part of a new, national state in 1860, its financial sector was radically transformed under Piedmontese influence. This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the aggressive penetration of a Northern credit institution, the future Bank of Italy, into the South following unification harmed the local banking system and highlights instead its transformative role in modernising and deepening regional credit markets. On the basis of new statistics, banking and political records, this contribution shows that the introduction of ‘foreign’ banking from Northern Italy under the auspices of a national, constitutional government resulted in a financial revolution and a democratisation of credit supply to the advantage of the whole South. Public banking under the Bourbons had privileged the needs of an absolute government over those of the private economy and of the capital city over those of the rest of the country, retarding financial development. Credit undersupply and regional fragmentation could only be overcome through the integration of the South within a larger Italian market, in which, however, the lion's share went to a predominantly Northern institution.

This brief survey gives an overview of the research on Japanese financial and monetary history based on the records of the Bank of Japan Archives. We briefly describe the Bank of Japan's organizational history, the activities of the Archives, their history and the classification of documents preserved in the Archives. We finally survey the recent research in Japanese economic history from the viewpoint of materials in the Archives.

The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), a state-controlled holding company, was founded in 1933. Its original mission was to prevent the collapse of Italy's largest universal banks by taking over their huge industrial shareholdings. As a consequence, the historiography traditionally associates it with the concept of ‘entrepreneurial state’. This article aims to challenge this interpretation by focusing on the ideas and actions of three prominent figures: Alberto Beneduce, the IRI's first chairman; Donato Menichella, Beneduce's right-hand man who became governor of the Bank of Italy after World War II; and Pasquale Saraceno, a technocrat who spent his entire career as one of the IRI's top managers. Beneduce and Menichella regarded the IRI as a financial intermediary open to private shareholders. To Saraceno, by contrast, the IRI was an expression of a Catholic ideology that entrusted to the state the mission of promoting the industrialization of the south. This view, which aimed at reducing regional inequalities in order to complete the country's political unification, prevailed only in the second half of the 1950s. By trying to blend profit maximization with political and social goals, this strategy sowed the seeds of the IRI's decline and eventual demise.

The Swiss financial centre, as it developed during the twentieth century, has for a long time been presented and perceived as a singularly stable and solid environment escaping crises and restructuring. This view, promoted by the dominant actors – private banks, cantonal banks and large commercial banks – presenting their own development, in a teleological vision, as success stories, is strongly challenged by more recent research developments. Our article deals with the evolution of banking demography in Switzerland between 1850 and 2000 and examines the exits of banking institutions from the statistics, identifying six periods of crisis and restructuring. The article proposes a new statistical series that makes it possible to scrutinise with a high level of granularity the banks that fail or are taken over, in particular by observing their category of bank and, for the period 1934–99, their size. It uses historical banking demography as a gateway to understand more broadly the phases of transformation of the financial centre. In doing so, this contribution questions the gap between the existence of significant phases of banking instability, their low importance in collective memory, and the perception of the Swiss banking sector as a model of stability. It also helps to refine our understanding of the evolution of the Swiss financial centre in general.