bank run

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The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History by Kirsten Grind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, financial engineering, fixed income, fulfillment center, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, junk bonds, low interest rates, Maui Hawaii, money market fund, mortgage debt, naked short selling, NetJets, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, too big to fail, Y2K

In just three days, customers pulled out a collective $1.5 billion, surpassing IndyMac’s giant deposit loss. “We had never seen anything like it,” said one of the deposit team managers later. WaMu’s own bank run was now, officially, under way. On the fourth day, a Tuesday, customers withdrew $1.8 billion. Together those two numbers represented about 2 percent of WaMu’s retail deposit base of $148.2 billion.* The last time WaMu had suffered through a bank run of this magnitude was in midst of the Great Depression.23 On a cold February morning in the winter of 1931, Seattle residents woke up to a banner headline in the local paper: the troubled Puget Sound Savings and Loan Association would not open the next day.

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To keep from further spooking customers, WaMu held off on closing about a hundred branches across the country that hadn’t been making money, and that had been scheduled to close before the run started. No one wanted to give the public any reason to think WaMu was shutting down. On the Tuesday when WaMu customers withdrew $1.8 billion, the bank run peaked. Then it began to subside. Bank runs, while they are sparked by unknown events, generally play out like a bubble, with a run-up, a climax, and a fall. WaMu’s run was no different. Soon deposit outflows fell back into the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. Two weeks after IndyMac’s failure, the WaMu panic ended.

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WaMu had called the meeting as a way to update the regulators on the bank’s financial condition following the bank run. They had no idea that their bank had fueled such a battle between the two agencies. In Reich’s conference room at the OTS’s frayed headquarters, Killinger and WaMu’s treasurer, Robert Williams, ran through WaMu’s capital and liquidity positions. WaMu was considered well capitalized, even though it had just posted a stunning $3.3 billion loss in the second quarter because of its bad loans—its highest quarterly loss ever. As a result of the bank run, the bank’s liquidity had drained to about $50 billion. The government agencies still deemed that amount healthy.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

The first was available during the Great Depression, but the Federal Reserve failed to use it effectively; the second came into being when New Deal banking legislation created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). These two antidotes to bank runs are slightly different. Lender-of-last-resort support stops a bank run by giving banks ready access to cash so they can pay off their depositors, thus sparing them having to liquidate assets at fire-sale prices. Deposit insurance, by contrast, prevents bank runs from occurring in the first place: it reassures depositors that they will get their money back if the bank becomes illiquid or even insolvent. In the postwar era, both lender-of-last-resort support and deposit insurance became the norm, not only in the United States but in most capitalist nations.

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Building & Loan, but they suffered from the same vulnerability to a bank run. This would not have been a problem had the shadow banks made the same bargain as regular banks, submitting to increased regulation in exchange for access to lender-of-last-resort support and the equivalent of deposit insurance. But they did not. Even worse, these institutions grew to rival the conventional banking system, lending comparable amounts of money. It’s little wonder that the shadow banking system was at the heart of what would become the mother of all bank runs. A World Awash in Cash All of these factors—financial innovation, failures of corporate governance, easy monetary policy, failures of government, and the shadow banking system—contributed to the onset of the crisis.

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As the run continued, fears mounted that other well-regulated banks with deposit insurance might suffer runs as well, then spiral from illiquidity to insolvency. As irrational as these bank runs may have seemed, depositors actually did have reason to worry. Like Countrywide, Northern Rock offered deposit insurance only up to a certain point: $100,000 in the case of Countrywide, and £30,000 in the case of Northern Rock. Plenty of depositors had sums well in excess of these amounts, and should the bank become insolvent—with or without the support of a lender of last resort—they would lose their savings. In fact, in the United States in 2007, some 40 percent of conventional deposits were uninsured. Bank runs, in other words, were rather rational.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

Today, when everybody with money in the bank comes and asks for it at the same time, we call it a bank run. And the banks and the people who want their money back—which is to say, basically, everybody—are still screwed. While paper money was new to Europe, banking and bank runs were not. In Venice, money changers had started storing gold for people in the fourteenth century—and lending that gold out to other people. The money changers sat on benches on a busy bridge over the Grand Canal, so they were called banchieri, which translates as “bench-sitters,” and which is the root of our words banker and bank. To reduce the risk of bank runs, the Venetians required the bench-sitters to keep a certain percentage of gold in reserve.

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A boxing promoter at Madison Square Garden bartered tickets for “hats, shoes, cigars, combs, soap, chisels, kettles, sacks of potatoes, and foot balm.” The most famous line Roosevelt delivered the day he was inaugurated was perhaps the perfect response to the biggest bank run in American history: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In the middle of a gargantuan bank run—the canonical self-fulfilling prophecy—fear itself is the essential problem. Warren got in to see Roosevelt at the White House at 10:30 p.m. the next night. A few hours later, sitting in his study, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, in his second act as president, Roosevelt signed a proclamation that temporarily closed every bank in America.

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And the depositors in the shadow banks—the corporate treasurers and money-market funds and pension funds that had trillions of dollars of cash—were starting to demand their money back. It was the start of the biggest bank run in history. The run hit Bear Stearns first. Bear was a small, risk-loving investment bank that borrowed tons of money from money-market funds and used it to buy mortgage-backed bonds. In March 2008, the funds decided the risk of lending to Bear was no longer worth it. Fidelity, the biggest money-market fund manager in America, had been lending Bear nearly $10 billion. In a single week, they demanded every penny of it back. This is the moment in the bank run when all the depositors line up outside the bank to withdraw their money.

Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

First, because a bank run exhausts the bank’s assets at date 1, a late consumer who waits until date 2 to withdraw will be left with nothing, so whenever there is a bank run, it will involve all the late consumers and not just some of them. Second, if the market for the risky asset is illiquid, the sale of the representative bank’s holding of the risky asset will drive down the price, thus making it harder to meet the depositors’ demands. The all-or-nothing character of bank runs is, of course, familiar from the work of Diamond and Dybvig (1983). The difference is that in the present model bank runs are not “sunspot” phenomena: they occur only when there is no other equilibrium outcome possible.

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The total illiquidity of the risky asset plays an important equilibrating role in this version of the model. Because the risky asset cannot be liquidated at date 1, there is always something left to pay the late withdrawers at date 2. For this reason, bank runs are typically partial, that is, they involve only a fraction of the late consumers, unlike the Diamond–Dybvig (1983) model in which a bank run involves all the late consumers. As long as there is a positive value of the risky asset RX 0, there must be a positive fraction 1 ␣(R) 0 of late consumers who wait until the last period to withdraw. Otherwise the consumption of the late withdrawers c22(R)RX/(1␣(R)) would be infinite.

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The graphs in this figure represent the equilibrium consumption levels of early and late consumers, respectively, as a function of the risky asset return R. For high values of R (i.e. R R*), there is no possibility of a bank run. The consumption of early consumers is fixed by the standard deposit contract at c1(R) c and the consumption of late consumers is given by the budget constraint c2(R) L RX c. For lower values of R(R R*), it is impossible to pay the early consumers the fixed amount c promised by the standard deposit contract without violating the late consumers’ incentive constraint and a bank run inevitably ensues. However, there cannot be a partial run. The terms of the standard deposit contract require the bank to liquidate all of its assets at the second date if it cannot pay c to every depositor who demands it.

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

Problems arise, however, if many depositors demand their money at the same time. This could happen if depositors become worried about the bank’s solvency and try to get their money out before it is too late. As we know from the fate of the Bailey Building and Loan Association in the movie, this can give rise to a bank run. Bank runs are sometimes discussed as examples of self-fulfilling expectations; that is, events that become reality just because people expect them and act on the basis of these expectations. If investors fear that other investors are about to run and withdraw their money from the bank, it may make sense for them to run themselves and try to withdraw their money.

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See mortgage default Delaware, bankruptcy in, 247n19 deleveraging, through asset sales, 64, 175, 257n19, 306n30 demand deposits: availability of, as benefit to economy, 49, 148; in balance sheets, 48, 248n4; in bank runs, 51–52, 150–53; as form of money, 294n10; in payment system, 49. See also deposit(s) Demirguç-Kunt, Asli, 251n24, 315n74 Demyanyk, Yuliya, 254nn43–44, 297n33 De Nicolò, Gianni, 249n12 Denmark, costs of bailouts in, 292n39 deposit(s): in balance sheets, 48–49; bank loans funded by, 48–49, 51–52; banknotes and, 149–50; in bank runs, 51–52; beneficial to economy, in payment system, 49, 148, 152–53; versus cash, 153, 154, 294n10; cost of, for banks, 111; as form of money, 150, 293n10; as funding sources of banks, 48–49, 51–52, 111, 150, 278n21; insurance on (See deposit insurance); in liquidity transformation, 155–56, 250n17; in maturity transformation, 51; as money-like debt, 154–56; in savings and loans institutions, 248n2; in solvency risks from maturity transformation, 51; as unique service of banks, 148; and vulnerability to runs, 150–53 deposit insurance: creditors protected by, 62, 163; in Europe, 242n25; as explicit guarantee, 129, 136–37, 139; functions of, 62; money market funds as lacking, 67, 93, 309n47; premium charged for, 111, 136–37; runs in absence of, 93, 273n46; in United States (See Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation) Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) of 1980 (U.S.), 251n28 deregulation: and concentration in financial sector, 89, 269n27; of interest rates, 54, 251n28; of mergers, 251n28; in savings and loan crisis of 1980s, 55, 252n35; of savings banks, 54–55, 94, 251n28 derivatives, 69–74; accounting rules for treatment of, 71, 85–86, 260n42, 266n11, 266n13; in bankruptcy, exceptions for, 164, 227, 236n35, 301n55, 336n57; clearinghouses for, 334n46; complexity of, 71–72; credit insurance as, 73–74; definition of, 69; forward contracts as, 69–70; gambling with, 70–71, 73, 123; history of, 70; in LTCM crisis of 1998, 72; netting of, 85–86, 267nn15–17; regulatory capture and, 204; rise of, 70; risks from, 70–73; scandals involving, 70–71, 328n6; transparency in, lack of, 71–72, 261n43; transparency in, proposal to increase, 204, 325n51; types of, 69–70, 260n37.

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After the collapse in 1878 of the City of Glasgow Bank, in which depositors did not lose anything but 80 percent of the shareholders were personally bankrupted, the trend toward limiting bank owners’ liability accelerated. Still, well into the twentieth century, banks’ shareholders frequently had extended liability that required them to cover losses beyond the amount of their original investment.23 Extended liability was ineffective in preventing bank runs and losses to depositors during the Great Depression because of many personal bank-ruptcies.24 Following that experience, the United States established explicit deposit insurance by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Banks that are FDIC members pay a premium, and their deposits are then guaranteed by the FDIC up to a maximum amount, currently $250,000.

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

So banking carries with it, as an inevitable feature, the possibility of bank runs—sudden losses of confidence that cause panics, which end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Furthermore, bank runs can be contagious, both because panic may spread to other banks and because one bank’s fire sales, by driving down the value of other banks’ assets, can push those other banks into the same kind of financial distress. As some readers may already have noticed, there’s a clear family resemblance between the logic of bank runs—­especially contagious bank runs—and that of the Minsky moment, in which everyone simultaneously tries to pay down debt.

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The main difference is that high levels of debt and leverage in the economy as a whole, making a Minsky moment possible, happen only occasionally, whereas banks are normally leveraged enough that a sudden loss of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The possibility of bank runs is more or less inherent in the nature of banking. Before the 1930s there were two main answers to the problem of bank runs. First, banks themselves tried to seem as solid as possible, both through appearances—that’s why bank buildings were so often massive marble structures—and by actually being very cautious. In the nineteenth century banks often had “capital ratios” of 20 or 25 percent—that is, the value of their deposits was only 75 or 80 percent of the value of their assets.

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On one side, Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which guaranteed (and still guarantees) depositors against loss if their bank should happen to fail. If you’ve ever seen the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, which features a run on Jimmy Stewart’s bank, you might be interested to know that the scene is completely anachronistic: by the time the supposed bank run takes place, that is, just after World War II, deposits were already insured, and old-fashioned bank runs were things of the past. On the other side, Glass-Steagall limited the amount of risk banks could take. This was especially necessary given the establishment of deposit insurance, which could have created enormous “moral hazard.” That is, it could have created a situation in which bankers could raise lots of money, no questions asked—hey, it’s all government-insured—then put that money into high-risk, high-stakes investments, figuring that it was heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

Staff worked through the night to ensure that bank branches across Greece had sufficient notes to meet depositor demand, and so contain any incipient physical bank run. Incredibly, this operation proceeded without anyone noticing. The Bank of Greece tracked a demand for paper currency through bank branch orders for currency. Large withdrawals were normally granted with notice of a day or two. The Bank also noticed a spike in purchases of gold sovereigns. It did not have to deploy teams of ‘bank-run spotters’ as the Bank of England had done in the crisis of 2008. As far as ordinary Greeks were concerned, the cash machines continued to function.

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I wondered if the Eurogroup geniuses who had set the Cypriot bank run in motion had ever read Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chat’, delivered on the radio in similar circumstances exactly eighty years previously: ‘It needs no prophet to tell you that when the people find that they can get their money – that they can get it when they want it for all legitimate purposes – the phantom of fear will soon be laid.’ Thus, in a statesmanlike way, Roosevelt used the broadcast media to boost confidence and douse the flames of financial panic. Sadly, no statesman of similar stature emerged in Europe during the Eurozone crisis. In 1933 Roosevelt stopped bank runs by creating deposit insurance.

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Soon there would be not enough euro notes in the country to cope with the number of Greeks trying to get their hands on their money from cash machines and bank branches. A secret plan was activated. A senior official overseeing Greece’s bailout told me that when it became known that the IMF were considering not paying out the final tranche, there was the beginning of a bank run. ‘We’re talking about June 2011,’ he told me, ‘when Greeks were taking about one to two billion euros a day from the banking system. And the Greeks had to send military planes to Italy to get banknotes. It got to that point.’ A decade after it gave up the drachma, the world’s oldest existing currency, Greece faced the crushing reality that it did not have the sovereign authority to meet the demand for paper currency from its own citizens.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Consider a narrative-based chronology of the 2007–9 world financial crisis, which taps into stories about nineteenth-century bank runs that were virtually synonymous with financial crises. After the Great Depression, bank runs were thought to be cured. The Northern Rock bank run in 2007, the first UK bank run since 1866, brought back the old narratives of panicked depositors and angry crowds outside closed banks. The story led to an international skittishness, to the Washington Mutual (WaMu) bank run a year later in the United States, and to the Reserve Prime Fund run a few days after that in 2008. These events then led to the very unconventional US government guarantee of US money market funds for a year.

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The answer was “general prosperity,” referring to McKinley’s words during the campaign. The joke faded in 1897 around a year after the election; it lost its effect when the economy began showing signs of improvement.13 Narratives Trigger the 1893 Bank Runs The 1893–99 depression in the United States started quite suddenly in the spring of 1893 with a string of bank runs. Depositors rushed to pull their money out of banks, thereby fueling the bank failures that they feared. But what triggered the bank run? One trigger was a rumor that began on April 17, 1893: the US subtreasury offices would no longer redeem Treasury notes in gold but would provide only silver, in amounts worth about half as much as the notes.

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Days after his inauguration in 1933, he took the unusual step of addressing the nation by radio during a massive national bank run that had necessitated shutting down all the banks. In this “fireside chat,” he explained the banking crisis and asked people not to continue their demands on banks. He spoke to the nation as a military commander would speak to his troops before a battle, asking for their courage and selflessness. Roosevelt asserted, “You people must have faith. You must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear.”25 The public honored Roosevelt’s personal request. The bank run ended, and money flowed into, not out of, the banks when they reopened.

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

The only constraining factor is the overall level of reserves and the risk of a bank run. If too many people ask to exchange their fiduciary media for money proper, any bank will face the risk of running out of reserves. Naturally, this risk increases if the bank is perceived to be in trouble, maybe as a result of problems in its loan portfolio. Once the soundness of a bank is questioned, outflows are likely to accelerate. In a fractional-reserve banking system, and that means today practically every banking system, every bank is potentially at risk of a bank run. A paper money system and a fractional-reserve banking system are confidence-based.

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They can increase borrowing and therefore overall levels of debt. Today extensive measures have been taken and an elaborate regulatory infrastructure has been erected to reduce the risk of bank runs and to increase the confidence of the public in the soundness of the fractional-reserve banking industry. More importantly, the abandonment of a metallic standard and the adoption of a full paper money system have removed the inelasticity of bank reserves. When banks run low on reserves and face increased outflows (naturally redemptions are no longer in gold but in physical paper money or in the form of transfers to other banks), they can get new reserves from the central bank, which has a lender-of-last-resort function and, under a paper money standard, can create as much reserve money as it wishes “at essentially no cost” (Bernanke).

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In the 10 years to the start of the most recent crisis in 2007, bank balance sheets in the United States more than doubled, from $4.7 trillion to $10.2 trillion.3 The Fed’s M2 measure of total money supply rose over the same period from less than $4 trillion to more than $7 trillion.4 From 1996 to 2006, total mortgage debt outstanding in the United States almost tripled, from $4.8 trillion to $13.5 trillion,5 as house prices appreciated, in inflation-adjusted terms, three times faster as over the preceding 100 years.6 Why I Wrote This Book It seems undeniable that elastic money has not brought greater stability. Regarding the stability of money’s purchasing power, the historical record of paper money systems has always been exceptionally poor. But it is now becoming increasingly obvious that the global conversion to paper money has also failed to put an end to bank runs, financial crises, and economic depressions. Quite to the contrary, those crises appear to become more frequent and more severe the longer we use fully elastic money and the more the supply of immaterial money expands. Astonishingly, there is an established body of economic theory that explains with great clarity and precision why this must be the case: the Currency School of the British Classical economists and, in particular, the Austrian School of Economics.

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

As we’ve seen, Fed sources routinely overlook the role that misguided regulations played in causing or at least aggravating pre-Fed crises, blaming them instead on random outbreaks of unwarranted fear. “Occasionally,” the Dallas Fed says (FRBD 2006: 8), the public feared that banks would not or could not honor the promise to redeem [their] notes, which led to bank runs. Believing that a particular bank’s ability to pay was questionable, a large number of people in a single day would demand to have their banknotes exchanged for gold or silver. These bank runs created fear that often spread, causing runs on other banks and general financial panic. . . . Financial panics such as these occurred frequently during the 1800s and early 1900s. In his opening George Washington University lecture, Ben Bernanke (2012a) likewise speaks of panic spreading, like a cold, from one bank to the rest.

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In his opening George Washington University lecture, Ben Bernanke (2012a) likewise speaks of panic spreading, like a cold, from one bank to the rest. “[I]f one bank is having problems,” he says, people “might begin to worry about problems in their bank. And so, a bank run can lead to widespread bank runs or a banking panic, more broadly.” To illustrate the point, Bernanke refers to the run on Jimmy Stewart’s (that is, George Bailey’s) perfectly solvent bank in It’s a Wonderful Life. Had the Federal Reserve been on the job, he says, Bailey wouldn’t have had to depend on the generosity of the good citizens of Bedford Falls.15 But the sort of financial panic that Bernanke’s “Frank Capra” theory describes happens only on TV (where, admittedly, it happens with alarming regularity, every December).

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Only if panic becomes general—if depositors lose confidence in the entire banking system—will depositors switch to holding high-powered money, weakening all depository institutions in the process.8 Thus, a crucial (though often implicit) assumption in the pro-lender-of-last-resort literature is, to quote Robert Solow (1982: 238), that “any bank failure diminishes confidence in the whole system,” leaving no private banks in a position to stem a panic. This is a very strong assumption, especially in view of the paucity of support one finds for it in history. In U.S. experience, Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber (1986) found no evidence of any contagion effects from bank runs during the free-banking era (1837–60). Reviewing the national banking era (1863–1913), George Kaufman (1988: 16) found only limited evidence of contagions in the panics of 1878, 1893, and 1908; and the evidence is weak except for 1893. Even during the “Great Contraction” of 1930–33—the episode from which contemporary authorities still seem to draw all of their conclusions—contagion effects appear to have been limited regionally until late 1932; prior to 1932, moreover, runs were confined for the most part to banks suffering from prerun insolvency or to banks affiliated with insolvent firms (Wicker 1980).

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

With leverage, rigidity, and complexity galore, all crypto needed to set itself on fire was a match—a bank run. As you’ll recall, a bank run can occur in a regulated marketplace, but the existence of a trusted third party backstopping said banks is a mitigating factor. Since the FDIC was created in the 1930s, not a penny of FDIC-insured money in licensed US banks has been lost. But again, the lack of a trusted third party is the entire idea of crypto, so when the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan there is no off switch to make the fan stop spinning. As my toddler might say, poopie go everywhere. The causes of the 2022 crypto bank run—or bank runs, if we’re being more accurate—are still highly contested, but they may not matter.

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The bank’s financial position is in fact healthy and hedged against such a possibility, but these rumors gather steam, and an economic narrative forms that the bank itself may become insolvent. As more and more depositors attempt to take their money out, a bank run ensues, resulting in its financial collapse. The economic event, a drought, didn’t directly produce the bank run—the bank was healthy. It was the rapid spread of a distorted economic narrative that led to its downfall. Narrative Economics was published in 2019, prior to both the current viral spread of cryptocurrency and the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that, it is remarkable to observe how intertwined these two viruses would become in the following years.

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Slightly adjusting for the layman what Professor Allen describes so well in her paper, there are three broad similarities between the systemic weaknesses revealed in the subprime crisis and the current construction of the crypto markets: leverage, rigidity, and complexity. They make the system very fragile, so that if a bank run occurs, it can trigger a crash. Leverage + Rigidity + Complexity + Bank Run = Crash Leverage is pretty simple: You borrow money to buy something. The more you borrow in relation to your actual money (equity), the more the upside, but there’s also the downside. If what you are investing in (or gambling on) goes up in value, you can make a lot of money.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

First, banks might suspend withdrawal of deposits in the face of a potential bank run. Banks could just shut their doors for a few days until the crisis has subsided. Of course, for a bank to close its doors, even if only because of a temporary shortage of liquidity, would send a signal that might lead to a loss of confidence on the part of depositors. It might only encourage a run to start sooner than would otherwise be the case, and if suspensions were regarded as potentially likely, then bank deposits would no longer function effectively as money. Second, governments could guarantee bank deposits to remove the incentive to join a bank run. Deposit insurance is now a common feature of most advanced economies’ banking systems.

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When the western banking system teetered on the verge of collapse, only drastic intervention, including partial nationalisation, saved it from going over the edge. The potential catastrophe of a collapse finally provoked action to recapitalise the banking system, using public money if necessary; the UK was first to respond, followed by the United States and then continental Europe. That action ended the bank run. The problem was that governments ended up guaranteeing all private creditors of the banks, imposing on future taxpayers a burden of unknown magnitude. Between the autumn of 2008 and the summer of 2009, there was a collapse of confidence and output around the world. World trade fell more rapidly than during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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As Macheath pointed out in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, why rob a bank and risk imprisonment when you could start a bank and create money? Both robbers and founders are attracted to banks because that is usually where the money is. But in September 2008 the money wasn’t there. Banks were losing money hand over fist as people who had been willing to lend them large sums suddenly refused to make new loans. Unlike the frequent bank runs in the nineteenth century, when individual depositors occasionally panicked and withdrew their funds, the change of heart had come from other financial institutions, wholesale investors such as money market and hedge funds. Unable to replace these sources of funding, banks had to call in loans, sell assets, and, in some cases, seek funding from their central bank.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

“The mechanic or day laborer who would have a feeling of timidity about entering a big banking house to deposit a small share of his earnings, would gladly avail himself of an opportunity to make the deposit with the local post-master, for the reason that he feels that he has as much right to be there as any other man, for the post-office is a part of the Governmental structure he helps support, and he reckons justly that he is entitled to share in its benefits.”39 The second purpose of general reform was also present from the beginning. Creswell reasoned that the postal banks would cure the bank runs that were endemic to the banking system in the nineteenth century: “The financial difficulties in which the country has been … involved … have demonstrated the necessity for some means of maintaining confidence in times of threatened disaster, and of gathering and wisely employing the immense wealth scattered among the people, to prevent panic and escape the ruin which inevitably follows in its track.”40 Indeed, many bank runs occurred between 1880 and 1910, afflicting both national and state banks and causing nationwide distrust.41 A government-supported bank would go a long way toward infusing trust back into the system.

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Even though total deposits didn’t rise during this time, most of the bank failures happened in those midregions, where the deposits did rise the most. When more banks started to fail nationwide, postal savings increased correspondingly. 115. Ibid., 718. 116. Ibid., 710. 117. David Hu, “The Influence of the U.S. Postal Savings System on Bank Runs,” Yale Journal of Economics 2, iss. 1 (2013), accessed March 12, 2015, econjournal.sites.yale.edu/articles/2/influence-us-postal-savings-system-bank-runs. 118. Sissman, “Development of the Postal,” 710. 119. United States Post Office, Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1935 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 28. 120. United States Post Office, Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1941 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 35. 121.

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A bank only keeps a small reserve to pay out the occasional depositor. This is how banking works but only when people trust banks and allow them to hold on to their money. The only historically proven antidote to fear-induced runs is a government willing to insure bank deposits. Since the inception of deposit insurance, bank runs have been a rare historical phenomenon—so rare that you and I are willing to put all our money in a bank and forget about it. We don’t worry about who manages the bank or what they do with our money. Even if we hear on the news that our bank has started to lend large sums of money to piano-playing cats, which we think is a bad idea, we would not feel the need to show up at the bank the next morning to ask for all of our money back.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 1st Floor 222 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8HB www.simonandschuster.co.uk Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-47111-354-3 eBook ISBN: 978-1-47111-356-7 Typeset in the UK by M Rules Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY For Fiona Contents Prologue 1 Tuesday, 7 October 2008 2 Company of Scotland 3 New World 4 Paisley Pattern 5 Battle of the Banks 6 The End of Boom and Bust 7 Fred the Shred 8 Sir Fred 9 Canny Scottish Bankers 10 Safe as Houses 11 Light Touch 12 Double Dutch 13 Bank Run 14 Boom Goes Bust 15 Five Years On Afterword Sources and Acknowledgements Notes Index List of Illustrations Prologue ‘You have a long time to regret it if you don’t get it right.’ Fred Goodwin, 7 June 2004, Businessweek During the boom years, at the beginning of the century, the Royal Bank of Scotland chose an advertising slogan.

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Rivalry between the pair had been a significant factor when both charged ahead in 2007 trying to buy the sub-prime-riddled Dutch bank ABN Amro, a race which Goodwin won with disastrous consequences. Now, on the call, Varley and the others turn on Goodwin and start pushing. It is RBS that is the issue; you are the biggest problem. Another old rival is in trouble and is in the middle of being taken over after experiencing its own bank run. Andy Hornby’s crippled HBOS, which contains the old Bank of Scotland, RBS’s Edinburgh rival for almost three centuries, is being bought by the hitherto cautious and conservative Lloyds, run by Eric Daniels. ‘Fred hated the HBOS guys,’ says a friend. ‘He really enjoyed when they had to be taken over by Lloyds and were humiliated.

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Rival outfits opened in Dundee, Ayr, Aberdeen and Perth and banks such as the Bank of Scotland started to develop national networks of branches – another innovation well ahead of England. There were more periodic panics, as there usually are. In 1857 the Western Bank in Glasgow failed spectacularly in the middle of a bank-run. It went down with liabilities of almost £9m. Its shareholders were wiped out. In 1878 there was an even worse disaster when the City of Glasgow Bank folded, following its botched investment in the Racine and Mississippi railroad in America. A difficult situation was exacerbated by extensive fraud on the part of the bank’s management.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

PART THREE CONTAGION 12 MERGERS AND MUTATIONS The frantic and fragile rescue of Continental Illinois early in the summer of 1984 had shown bank regulators just how quickly a crisis could erupt and how tough it was to stop one once it got rolling. However, the regulators who coped with that crisis at least recognized what they were dealing with: a bank run, albeit an especially fast and persistent one. Bank runs were a familiar species of trouble that had been around for about as long as there had been banks. But when Jerry Corrigan looked at the rest of the financial landscape from his post as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, he saw new hazards that regulators had never dealt with before, things that could blow up without warning almost anywhere in the financial system.

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By the following Wednesday, long lines were forming outside other thrifts insured by the private insurance fund, even though they had no exposure to the failed firm in Florida. News coverage about the bank runs was starting to attract notice far outside Ohio. That’s why the thrift executives had flown to Washington that morning and gathered in Volcker’s office. The towering central banker had done everything he could to show his concern, but the tools Volcker had available were limited. He could extend emergency loans to help with the bank runs, but what these thrifts really needed was federal deposit insurance, and the Fed didn’t sell that—the thrifts had to get it from the FSLIC.

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In 2008, a run on money market funds—triggered by the Lehman bankruptcy, which caused a giant money market fund to lose money on Lehman’s commercial paper—nearly disabled the commercial paper market. Several had already had to jack up the rates they paid: Robert A. Bennett, “$4.5 Billion Credit for Chicago Bank Set by 16 Others,” New York Times, May 15, 1984, p. 1. the mighty Federal Reserve also stood ready to lend: Carlson and Rose, “Can a Bank Run Be Stopped?” p. 3. the worst bank runs that would occur in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: Ibid., p. 1. Carlson and Rose note that “Washington Mutual lost 10 percent of its deposits and IndyMac lost about 8 percent, each in about two weeks. Thus, even in a more digital, seemingly faster moving era, these runs were less dramatic than the one on Continental, while still severe enough to lead to the seizure of both institutions by the FDIC.”

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

The central contention of the book is that recessions are the result of the government not responding quickly enough to a financial crisis, bank run, and deflationary collapse by increasing the money supply to re‐inflate the banking sector. It is typical of the Milton Friedman band of libertarianism in that it blames the government for an economic problem, but the flawed reasoning leads to suggesting even more government intervention as the solution. The glaring error in the book is that the authors never once discuss what causes these financial crises, bank runs, and deflationary collapses of the money supply. As we saw from the discussion of the Austrian business cycle theory, the only cause of an economy‐wide recession is the inflation of the money supply in the first place.

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Unsound money allows the possibility of mismatching maturity, of which fractional reserve banking is but a subset, and this leaves banks always liable to a liquidity crisis, or a bank run. Maturity mismatching, or fractional reserve banking as a special case of it, is always liable to a liquidity crisis if lenders and depositors were to demand their deposits at the same time. The only way to make maturity mismatching safe is with the presence of a lender of last resort standing ready to lend to banks in case of a bank run.26 In a society with sound money, a central bank would have to tax everyone not involved in the bank in order to bail out the bank.

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Unsound money thus creates a distinction between liquidity and solvency: a bank could be solvent in terms of the net present value of its assets but face a liquidity problem that prevents it from meeting its financial obligations within a certain period of time. But the lack of liquidity itself could trigger a bank run as depositors and lenders seek to get their deposits out of the bank. Worse, the lack of liquidity in one bank could lead to a lack of liquidity in other banks dealing with this bank, creating systemic risk problems. If the central bank credibly commits to providing liquidity in such cases, however, there will be no fear of a liquidity crisis, which in turn averts the scenario of a bank run and leaves the banking system safe. Fractional reserve banking, or maturity mismatching more generally, is likely to continue to cause financial crises without a central bank using an elastic money supply to bail out these banks.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Carlo Panico, for instance, partly in debate with Ben Fine, treats bank costs as a necessary input that must earn profits. This is an erroneous approach to the intermediary role of banks. 47 Lapavitsas, Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit, ch. 4. 48 Bank runs are fairly rare events in the history of mature capitalism, though the crisis of the 2000s has lent renewed relevance to this phenomenon. Mainstream theory is fully aware of the ineluctable risk of bank runs given the normal practices of commercial banking; see Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, ‘Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance and Liquidity’, Journal of Political Economy 91, 1983. 49 The idea of 100% reserves for banks, or ‘narrow banking’, is associated with the Chicago tradition in economics.

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Traditional banking stands in contrast to securitized banking; the former is the business of making and holding loans, with insured demand deposits as the main source of funds; the latter is the business of packaging and reselling loans, with repurchase agreements as the main source of funds. In this light, the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a system-wide bank run which, however, did not occur in the traditional but in the securitized banking sector. While a traditional bank run amounts to the mass withdrawal of deposits, a securitized bank run amounts to the mass withdrawal of repurchase agreements (repos). The cause of the run was concern about the liquidity of the bonds used as collateral for repos, particularly when these bonds were related to the subprime market.

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Townsend, ‘Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification’, Journal of Economic Theory 22, 1979. 9 See, for instance, Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Weiss, ‘Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information’, American Economic Review 71:3, 1981, pp. 393–410; Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore, ‘Credit Cycles’, Journal of Political Economy 105:2, 1997. 10 Once again, the literature is very broad; see, very selectively, Hayne Leland and David H. Pyle, ‘Informational Asymmetries, Financial Structure and Financial Intermediation’, The Journal of Finance 32, 1977; John Bryant, ‘A Model of Reserves, Bank Runs, and Deposit Insurance’, Journal of Banking and Finance 4, 1980; Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, ‘Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance and Liquidity’, Journal of Political Economy 91, 1983; Douglas Diamond, ‘Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring’, Review of Economic Studies 51, 1984; John H. Boyd and Edward C. Prescott, ‘Financial Intermediary-Coalitions’, Journal of Economic Theory 38, 1986; Douglas Diamond and Raghuram Rajan, ‘Liquidity Risk, Liquidity Creation, and Financial Fragility: A Theory of Banking’, Journal of Political Economy 109:2, 2001; Franklin Allen and Anthony M.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

And now it turned out that most of them had been mislabeled. As if on command, investors stopped buying mortgage-backed securities. All the financial institutions and special companies whose business model was to take out short-term credit to keep their trade in securities going discovered that they could no longer renew their loans. It was a bank run. As it concerned the shadow banking sector, it did not involve actual crowds of depositors rushing to the bank to get their savings out before everybody else did, but the mechanism and the effect of causing the bank to go belly-up in the process were the same. All the special companies, conduits, and structured investment vehicles filled to the brim with mortgage-backed securities that the banks had placed off their balance sheets depended on regularly being able to renew short-term loans of maybe $1 billion, $10 billion, or $30 billion for maturities ranging from as much as nine months to as little as 24 hours.

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In just a few moments, a stable bank could seem to be teetering on the brink of insolvency. Citigroup saw its balance sheet grow by $49 billion in a single day in December 2007. There was no other way out for the banks but to pull the emergency brake so that they could build up more capital, and several of them also started borrowing directly from the Fed. The drawn-out bank run can be said to have begun on August 9, 2007. That was when the French bank BNP Paribas took the unusual step of preventing investors from withdrawing money from three money-market funds invested in U.S. mortgagebacked securities. Only one week earlier, its head had made assurances that the bank's exposure to the subprime crisis was absolutely negligible, but now BNP explained that the collapse in prices made it impossible to assess the value of the funds.

…

He asked the person responsible whether this was a problem and was told that no major losses could be expected. Only two months later, however, the bank estimated its subprime losses at $10 billion. Prince chose to step down-taking $38 million in bonuses, stocks, and options with him. In September 2007, the United Kingdom was hit by a classic bank run taking place on real streets and squares. In scenes that the country had not witnessed for over 140 years, long lines of worried depositors wanting to withdraw their money were forming outside the branch offices of Northern Rock. This Newcastle bank had derived two-thirds of its financing from money-market loans, capable of being canceled at any time, and used the money for decadelong securitized mortgages whose value exceeded that of the actual homes.16 As Martin Wolf has concluded, government guarantees for the banking system meant that savers saw only the high rates of interest paid by Northern Rock, not the risks it was taking.

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

(Davidson, 2008) The ability to securitise loans means banks can make profits not by the quality of the loans they make, but by their quantity. The willingness of banks to lend to the subprime market was partially (and possibly predominantly) attributable to securitisation. Government guarantees & ‘too big to fail’ “Bank runs are a common feature of the extreme crises that have played a prominent role in monetary history. During a bank run, depositors rush to withdraw their deposits because they expect the bank to fail. In fact, the sudden withdrawals can force the bank to liquidate many of its assets at a loss and to fail. During a panic with many bank failures, there is a disruption of the monetary system and a reduction in production.”

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In accounting terms, this is known as cashflow insolvency. In banking jargon it is reffered to as a ‘liquidity crisis’. A liquidity crisis can happen if there is a significant outflow of funds (central bank reserves) from a bank to other banks or to customers who are withdrawing cash. This process can happen very quickly, as in a bank run, or slowly if its liabilities are withdrawn slightly faster than its loan assets are repaid. If a bank becomes unable to settle its liabilities to either customers or to other banks, then it is again declared insolvent and will need to cease trading. Avoiding a liquidity crisis relies on a process known as ‘asset liability management’, which involves managing and predicting inflows and outflows to ensure that a bank is always able to make its payments as and when it needs to.

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A liquidity ratio is similar, but allows banks to hold highly-liquid assets such as government bonds in place of cash and central bank reserves, with the idea being that bonds can easily be exchanged for cash and central bank reserves if customers are making higher than usual withdrawals from their accounts. In short, liquidity ratios and reserve ratios say, “What percentage of customers could withdraw their deposits simultaneously before the bank runs out of base money?” A reserve ratio or liquidity ratio of 10% would imply that the bank could suffer a withdrawal of up to 10% of its deposits before it would become illiquid and have to close its doors. In contrast, the capital or ‘capital reserves’ that are required by the Basel Capital Accords relate to the assets side of the balance sheet.

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

Deposits are not just a bank liability; they are the means of settling transactions in the economy. Further, depositors can pull out their money at any time they want. If the value of banking assets falls, spooked depositors may all demand their money when they sense the bank is in trouble—a bank run. Bank runs can lead to even healthy banks going under. For example, even a depositor in a healthy bank will “run” if he believes that other depositors are withdrawing their funds in a panic. The run dynamic is dangerous. It forces banks to sell assets at prices below market value. It can also damage the payment system of a country, which relies on bank deposits: when someone writes a check, it is cleared by shifting deposits from one bank to another.

…

If a bank’s short-term liabilities were all demanded at once, it would not be able call back the money it has lent out on a long-term basis. In other words, the mismatch in maturity makes banks vulnerable to a run. Even if a bank is fundamentally solvent, a run can make its failure self-fulfilling. A central bank can prevent self-fulfilling banking crises by providing liquidity (i.e., cash) to a bank to protect it from bank runs. Just the ability of a central bank to flood banks with cash may be sufficient to prevent runs from happening in the first place, because depositors then have faith that their money is protected. In the East Asian crisis, however, central banks couldn’t flood the banks with cash because it needed to be in U.S. dollars.

…

It can also damage the payment system of a country, which relies on bank deposits: when someone writes a check, it is cleared by shifting deposits from one bank to another. Businesses often pay their workers from deposit accounts. If the value of bank deposits is called into question, the entire payment system of a country may break down. It is a well-accepted axiom of banking regulation that the central bank must act as a “lender of last resort” to prevent bank runs. It can do so by explicitly insuring bank deposits, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) does, or by lending freely to liquidity-constrained banks. The so-called Bagehot Rule, named after the famous British journalist Walter Bagehot, calls for central banks to lend without limit at a penalty rate, to solvent firms, against good collateral.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

One of the roles of the Federal Reserve is the lender of last resort, which they unfortunately learned after the stock market crash of 1929 and the bank runs that followed. Ten thousand banks failed, roughly 40 percent, and $2 billion in deposits were wiped out—30 percent of the money supply disappeared. So did a similar percentage of GDP, and unemployment hit 25 percent. You can see that lost money supply is not a good thing. So the other big change happened twenty years later, in 1933. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was set up to insure depositors’ money, negating the desire for people to line up to get their money out at the first sign of a bank’s weakness. No more bank runs. Not many, anyway. (We can argue about whether the FDIC is really an insurance policy, as they undercharge banks for the privilege of insuring against bank runs, and you and I, the taxpayers, make up the difference.

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(We can argue about whether the FDIC is really an insurance policy, as they undercharge banks for the privilege of insuring against bank runs, and you and I, the taxpayers, make up the difference. Still, the FDIC is a decent bargain. It’s a backstop to panics—bank run panics anyway!) As long as banks make prudent loans, which, as we’ve seen in 2008, is not the greatest assumption. Twin bargains. Twin safety nets for fractional reserve banking so we don’t have to go back to the stifling days of gold. The Federal Reserve allows banks to post assets in exchange for loans to redeem depositors, in effect making the Fed the lender of last resort to banks.

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Money from nothing (and your checks for free). Sort of, anyway. This sleight of hand is called fractional reserve banking, and was an easy (if not a little sleazy, no?) way to increase money supply to, again, make room for productivity and wealth creation. But how much money? No one knows, which is why there were occasionally bank runs and panics and depressions that followed easy credit, one of the hazards of this flimsy system. Sixteen panics since 1812—it’s as American as apple pie! But banking did increase money supply beyond just how much gold could be extracted. In fact, since Adam and Eve, 160,000 tons of gold have been panned and mined from Mother Earth, enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

.* It briefly guaranteed $15 trillion of deposits, loaned the banks $2 trillion to fund withdrawals, and made a profit.8 The Fed made a profit acting as the lender of last resort in the worst financial crisis in nearly a millennium. The Fed took surprisingly little risk despite an avalanche of reckless claims to the contrary. Rather than strengthening the Fed’s ability to act more effectively as the lender of last resort in a bank run, policy makers have done the opposite. They have held banks more responsible for bank runs by intentionally weakening the Fed’s ability to act in a panic. Banks pulled back lending by raising credit standards. Risk-averse savings have subsequently sat unused, and the recovery has been anemic. Other well-intentioned policies would have the same effect.

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More valuable on-the-job training, large synergistic communities of experts, highly motivated and trained talent, and equity in the hands of eager risk-takers had compounding effects on the value of successful risk-taking. I recommended lower marginal tax rates to maintain higher payoffs in the face of slower growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The Obama administration did the opposite. I cautioned that holding the banks responsible for bank runs, instead of just loan losses, at a time when they were already reluctant to lend, would slow growth. I recommended strengthening government guarantees of banks and the Fed’s ability to function as the lender of last resort but charging banks and borrowers for these guarantees. The Obama administration did the opposite.

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That might be the case if risk underwriters had let equity sit idle to compensate for the risk of government guarantees of banks that lure risk-averse savings from their mattresses. After all, taxpayers bear those risks. But why would equity dial back risk-taking in the face of government guarantees of banks? The government made a profit loaning banks $2 trillion to fund withdrawals and making $15 trillion of guarantees (to stop further withdrawals) during the worst bank run since the 1930s.30 How concerned should risk-bearing taxpayers be about the risk of government guarantees? While it is true that, to a certain extent, bank guarantees also guarantee loan losses, one way or another the economy already bears that risk. Government guarantees of banks don’t change that.

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

Even in financial markets, some slackening of the rules was appropriate—as in, for instance, the liberalization that permitted interstate banking. But deregulators made two mistakes. One was failing to recognize that financial markets were more fragile than others, more vulnerable to panics and, indeed, more vital to the economy overall. Airline failures are rarely front-page news; bank runs are. The other mistake was failing to see that the relative financial stability of the postwar era was largely a result of the regulation put in place during the New Deal and after. With the turn toward market-driven economies in the 1980s, it was thought that markets had outgrown the ancient perils that arise from speculative frenzy, excessive borrowing, and greed—when in fact, Washington had been holding them in check.

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As Fannie’s and Freddie’s stocks were being battered, trouble was flaring at IndyMac, the Pasadena bank spun off from Countrywide. IndyMac, which had specialized in Alt-A loans, had been left holding thousands of shaky mortgages when the securitization market shut down. From late June to early July, Indy was hit with a bank run. Depositors withdrew $1.3 billion, about $100 million a day. On July 11, two months after the bank’s chairman, Michael Perry, had assured investors that his company was well capitalized, the Office of Thrift Supervision seized Indy—the second biggest bank to fail in U.S. history, trailing only Continental Illinois in 1984.

…

But credit was effectively being rationed by rank speculators. Worse, some of those purchasing “insurance” were short-sellers with an interest in seeing insurance prices soar. Because rising prices in the swap market were contagious, they contributed to fears of systemic weakness. They were not unlike the bank runs that fed the gloom of the 1930s. A junior Lehman executive, reflecting on rising swap rates, the pressure from short-sellers, and tightening credit conditions in general, sensed “the world falling apart.” The deepening woes of Fannie and Freddie further darkened the mood at Lehman—as did the nonstop articles speculating on the firm’s demise, which felt to AIG’s Willumstad like a tourniquet suffocating his company, too.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

The next morning, Northern Rock savers flocked to the bank’s branch offices, and pictures of terrified savers in a long line in front of the bank beamed onto computers, television screens, BlackBerries, and mobile phones around the world. By midmorning, a full-scale bank run was under way. Never before had so many terrified consumers and investors seen a bank run in action, in real time. Technology was helping to spread the panic. What brought Northern Rock down was another variant of the woes that had beset IKB and Cairn. At the turn of the century, the bank had embraced securitization with a vengeance, raising funds by selling masses of mortgage-backed bonds to investors all over the world.

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HG6024.U6T48 2009 332.660973—dc22 2009005127 ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0075-2 ISBN-10: 1-4391-0075-6 Visit us on the Web: http://www.SimonandSchuster.com For Helen and Analiese CONTENTS PREFACE PART 1: INNOVATION 1 THE DERIVATIVES DREAM 2 DANCING AROUND THE REGULATORS 3 THE DREAM TEAM 4 THE CUFFS COME OFF 5 MERGER MANIA PART 2: PERVERSION 6 INNOVATION UNLEASHED 7 MR. DIMON TAKES CHARGE 8 RISKY BUSINESS 9 LEVERAGING LUNACY 10 TREMORS PART 3: DISASTER 11 FIRST FAILURES 12 PANIC TAKES HOLD 13 BANK RUN 14 BEAR BLOWS UP 15 FREE FALL EPILOGUE NOTES GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR PREFACE Were the bankers mad? Were they evil? Or were they simply grotesquely greedy? To be sure, there have been plenty of booms and busts in history; market crashes are almost as old as the invention of money itself.

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At the ESF conference in Barcelona, for example, American brokers and City bankers swarmed around the Germans, in the hope of selling them more bonds. However, as Winters stood in Geneva International in July, it was clear that something had gone badly wrong with the IKB funds. He called his traders in London. “What’s going on?” he asked. “There’s something like a bank run starting in the commercial paper markets,” a trader replied. That news was alarming. Until that point, the commercial paper market had been deemed one of the safest, and dullest, corners of the financial world. It was where General Electric and other blue-chip giants raised the short-term funds that they needed for day-to-day operations.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

If some creditors thought that this might happen, they would try to get their money out first, which would provoke other creditors to do the same, triggering a bank run as everyone scrambled to avoid being last in line. All banks have this potential weakness, since they borrow short and lend long—they borrow money that they promise to return on short notice (deposits), and lend it out for long periods of time (mortgages). The rush by creditors to get their money out first is a classic feature of financial crises around the world, particularly in emerging markets. In the United States since the 1930s, deposit insurance has generally prevented bank runs by depositors—but that insurance did not cover the institutions lending money overnight to Bear Stearns and the hedge funds who parked their securities at Bear.

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(One theory at the time—since largely discredited—was that this infection had weakened commercial banks and helped cause the Depression.)100 As a result, J.P. Morgan was forced to spin off its investment banking operations, which became Morgan Stanley. Commercial banks were protected from panic-induced bank runs by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but had to accept tight federal regulation in return. The governance of the Federal Reserve was also reformed in the 1930s, strengthening the hand of presidential appointees and weakening the relative power of banks. The system that took form after 1933, in which banks gained government protection in exchange for accepting strict regulation, was the basis for half a century of financial stability—the longest in American history.

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As the long boom of the 1990s continued and the stock market continued to go up, LTCM soon faded into memory. U.S. policymakers did draw a number of important lessons from the emerging market crises, outlined by Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in a major lecture at the 2000 conference of the American Economics Association.51 Financial crises were the result of fundamental policy weaknesses: “Bank runs or their international analogues are not driven by sunspots: their likelihood is driven and determined by the extent of fundamental weaknesses.” It was more important to look at the soundness of the financial system than to simply count the total amount of debt: “When well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective corporate governance and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of contract enforcement, along with other elements of a strong financial system, are present, significant amounts of debt will be sustainable.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

After that, the main damage to Northern Rock’s balance sheet was done by online withdrawals. The elderly savers queuing in the streets made for alarming TV footage. But it was not their panic that was bringing down the bank. It was a bank run operating on an altogether different scale at the speed of computer terminals in money markets across the world. It was a bank run without deposit withdrawals. There had been no deposits. There was nothing to withdraw. For banks to find themselves a trillion dollars short, all that needed to happen was for major providers of funding to withdraw from the money markets.

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As Hyun Song Shin, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements and one of the foremost thinkers of the new breed of “macrofinance,” has put it, we need to analyze the global economy not in terms of an “island model” of international economic interaction—national economy to national economy—but through the “interlocking matrix” of corporate balance sheets—bank to bank.22 As both the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the crisis in the eurozone after 2010 would demonstrate, government deficits and current account imbalances are poor predictors of the force and speed with which modern financial crises can strike.23 This can be grasped only if we focus on the shocking adjustments that can take place within this interlocking matrix of financial accounts. For all the pressure that classic “macroeconomic imbalances”—in budgets and trade—can exert, a modern global bank run moves far more money far more abruptly.24 What the Europeans, the Americans, the Russians and the South Koreans were experiencing in 2008 and the Europeans would experience again after 2010 was an implosion in interbank credit. As long as your financial sector was modestly proportioned, big national currency reserves could see you through.

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But the really decisive break in market confidence came on the morning of August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribas, France’s most prominent bank, announced that it was freezing three of its funds.5 The explanation Paribas offered marked a decisive moment in the opening of the crisis: “The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitisation market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of their quality or credit rating.”6 Without valuation the assets could not be used as collateral. Without collateral there was no funding. And if there was no funding all the banks were in trouble, no matter how large their exposure to real estate. In a general liquidity freeze, the equivalent of a giant bank run, no bank was safe. As the implications of the announcement from Paris sank in, around noon Central European Time on August 9, 2007, the cost of borrowing on European interbank markets surged.7 As one senior bank executive commented, the event was disorientating: “It was something none of us had experienced.

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

The Federal Reserve was created in the years following the Panic of 1907 in an effort to bring stability to a domestic banking system that was beset with recurring financial panics and bank runs. The international monetary system—the use of gold as a single global currency—was also changed around the same time by political choices made in response to the economic necessities of World War I. Neither the domestic banking system nor the gold standard worked for society, and so they were themselves changed. This process of change was neither discrete, nor uncontroversial, nor even initially successful. The Federal Reserve System did not end bank runs; that required more political decisions, specifically the establishment of deposit insurance and effective bank supervision in 1933.

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Index Page numbers followed by f indicate figures; t indicate tables. anti-carry crashes, 170 anti-carry regimes, 165, 171–172, 210, 212 carry regime similarities to, 173–175 monetary perspective on, 168–170 signs of end of, 215 AQR Capital, 79 arbitrage, covered interest parity principle and, 21 Asian financial crisis, 23–25 global financial crisis compared with, 30 asset prices business cycle and, 126 carry regime and, 204 distortion of, 7 inflation of, 113–114 options and, 147 recessions and declines in, 6 assets under management (AUM), 74 by sovereign wealth funds, 75 Australia capital inflows, 40, 40f, 42 credit and net claims, 40, 40f credit growth, 40f, 41 interest rate spreads and, 41–42, 60–61 Australian dollar, 30 capital flows into, 62 returns on, 97, 97f bailouts, 197–199, 203 Bain and Company, 80 balance of payments, Turkey, 45 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 15, 17, 22 carry portfolio position comparison with, 63, 63t on corporate use of carry strategies, 80 currency liquidity data, 62 net claims data, 41 Bank of Japan (BOJ), 26, 216 quantitative easing policies by, 31 Bank of Korea, 197 bank runs, 218 banking system, money creation by, 109 bank-run dynamics, 65 Bhattacharya, Utpal, 142 bid-ask spread, 158–159, 167 big breaks, 184 BIS. See Bank for International Settlements BOJ. See Bank of Japan Brazil, 19, 39, 55n6, 65–66 current account, 31 Brazilian real, 11, 30, 66 Bretton Woods system, 218 Brownian noise, 97, 97f Bruno, Valentina, 80–81 bubble-boom economies, carry bubble conditions and, 39 business cycle carry and global, 2 carry bubbles and, 127–134 carry crashes and, 127–134 carry influence on, 57, 69 carry regime and, 125–127 money supply and, 125–126 Caballero, Ricardo, 59 call options, 146–147 Cambridge Associates, 79 capital asset pricing model, 99 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 219 221 222 capital inflows, Australia, 40, 40f, 42 capitalism, 195, 219, 220 carry central banks’ role in, 5–8 compensation incentives for, 70–72 corporate use of, 80–83 as cumulative advantage, 181–184 defining, 2 as flow from weak to strong, 179–181 global business cycle and, 2 hedge funds as agents of, 72–73 insidious structural aspects of, 200–205 leverage importance to, 70–72 lost opportunity to lean against, 220 as luck compounded, 184–186 monetary policy and, 3 as naturally occurring phenomenon, 88 necessary amounts of, 174 omnipresence of, 190–191 as power, 191–192 as rent-seeking, 175–177 rise of, 1 volatility, 86 carry bubbles, 6, 7 business cycle and, 127–134 credit bubbles and, 37–38, 41 credit demand and, 114 disguised, 134–140 economic indicators distorted by, 44–45 economic problems obscured by, 44 inflation and, 39 monetary conditions and, 39 nonmonetary assets and, 169 Ponzi schemes and, 140–143 as risk mispricing, 142 Turkey, 42–46 carry crashes, 6 Asian financial crisis and, 23–25 bailouts limiting losses from, 203 business cycle and, 127–134 carry trade returns and, 36 deflation and, 7, 170 deflation shock and, 121–124 in emerging economies, 201 incentive changes and, 84 inevitability of, 34–35, 108 leverage and, 96–98 liquidity and, 128 money supply and, 122–123 INDEX of 1998, 25–26 Turkey, 42–46 Turkish lira, of 2018, 45 of 2008, 30, 31 Volmageddon, 98, 161 yen melt-up and, 23–24 carry portfolios backtesting, 65–67 BIS data comparison with, 63, 63t constructing, 49–50 lessons from historical study of, 64–65 losses in, 51–56, 54f carry regime, 2 anti-carry regime similarity to, 173–175 asset prices and, 204 business cycle and, 125–127 central bank policies and, 86–89, 107, 208, 210 central bank power and, 123 central banks and collapses of, 215–216 central banks weakened by, 7 debt levels and, 168 defining, 107–108 deflation and, 113–121, 203, 210, 213 development of, 127, 134 economic growth and, 209 economic imbalances from, 201 financial market structure and, 7 fragility of, 201 monetary equilibrium and, 169 monetary growth and, 169 monetary perspective on, 168–170 money in, 108–113 nonmonetary assets and, 112, 114, 122 resource allocation and, 114–115 risk mispricing and, 134–140 S&P 500 importance to, 86–87, 87f theoretical alternative to, 166–168 vanishing point and, 116, 195, 209–210 volatility signs of ending, 214–218 carry trade.

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In particular, since the use of leverage means that even modest changes in position value can translate into a total loss of capital, risk controls will force trades to be closed when certain thresholds are hit. Risk controls can come from internal limits and can also be forced upon managers by lenders who require additional collateral to be posted to cover losses. In either case it is very easy for a “bank-run” dynamic to take place—losses lead to position reduction, forcing managers to trade into markets that are moving against them and, in the case of many emerging currencies, are illiquid. This activity triggers further losses, which require even more position reduction, and the cycle continues until moves in the exchange rate are so extreme that unlevered traders are induced to enter the market or central banks are forced to intervene to stabilize conditions.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

But for all of this armory of instruments, ultimately the goal of a central bank in a financial crisis was both very simple and very elusive—to reestablish trust in banks. Such breakdowns are not some historical curiosity. As I write this in October 2008, the world is in the middle of one such panic—the most severe for seventy-five years, since the bank runs of 1931-1933 that feature so prominently in the last few chapters of this book. The credit markets are frozen, financial institutions are hoarding cash, banks are going under or being taken over by the week, stock markets are crumbling. Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm.

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No doubt irritated at this obvious attempt to renege on a clear promise, he stormed out and began reporting that the bank was in trouble. By the afternoon, a small horde of depositors had begun lining up outside the branch’s tiny neoclassical limestone building to withdraw their savings before closing time. Until now, despite the Depression, there had been no bank runs in New York, and soon a crowd of twenty thousand curious bystanders had gathered to watch. As the anxious depositors became restless, a squad of mounted police had to be sent in to control them and several customers were arrested; and when the mob became frantic, the police charged the crowd with their horses.

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He would testify later that “I told them that the Bank of United States occupied a rather unique position in New York City, that in point of people served it was probably the largest bank in the city and that its closing might affect a large number of smaller banks and that I was afraid that it would be the spark that would ignite the whole city.” Broderick reminded the grandees that only two or three weeks before “they had rescued two of the largest private bankers in the city.” One of them was Kidder Peabody, an investment bank run by Boston Brahmins, founded in 1865, which as result of the crash and of subsequent withdrawals of deposits by, among others, the government of Italy, had had to be bailed out in 1930 with $15 million from J. P. Morgan and Chase. Though the meeting continued into the early hours of the morning, he was unable to persuade the few recalcitrants to change their mind.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

If the Knickerbocker revelations had occurred in calmer markets, they might not have triggered such a panicked response, but the market was already nervous and volatile after massive losses caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The failure of the Knickerbocker Trust was just the beginning of a more general loss of confidence, which led to another stock market crash, even further bank runs, and finally a full-scale liquidity crisis and threat to the stability of the financial system as a whole. This threat was stemmed only by collective action of the leading bankers of the day in the form of a private financial rescue organized by J. P. Morgan. In one of the most famous episodes in U.S. financial history, Morgan summoned the financiers to his town house in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan and would not allow them to leave until they had hammered out a rescue plan involving specific financial commitments by each one intended to calm the markets.

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Leading English banks had made leveraged investments in illiquid assets funded with short-term liabilities, exactly the type of investing that destroyed Lehman Brothers in 2008. As those liabilities came due, foreign creditors converted their sterling claims into gold that soon left England headed for the United States or France or some other gold power not yet feeling the full impact of the crisis. With the outflow of gold becoming acute and the pressures of the bank run threatening to destroy major banks in the City of London, England went off the gold standard on September 21, 1931. Almost immediately sterling fell sharply against the dollar and continued dropping, falling 30 percent in a matter of months. Many other countries, including Japan, the Scandinavian nations and members of the British Commonwealth, also left the gold standard and received the short-run benefits of devaluation.

…

Roosevelt was elected president to replace Herbert Hoover, whose entire term had been consumed by a stock bubble, a crash and then the Great Depression itself. However, Roosevelt would not be sworn in as president until March 1933, and in the four months between election and inauguration the situation deteriorated precipitously, with widespread U.S. bank failures and bank runs. Millions of Americans withdrew cash from the banks and stuffed it in drawers or mattresses, while others lost their entire life savings because they did not act in time. By Roosevelt’s inauguration, Americans had lost faith in so many institutions that what little hope remained seemed embodied in Roosevelt himself.

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

If Greg’s views were right, David said, more and more funds would hit the rocks. But if Greg’s bet really paid off and the mortgage market collapsed, the effects could be utterly catastrophic because banks had a colossal amount of mortgage risk on the books. The money markets could seize up and there could even be bank runs. Bank runs! This was a frightening, archaic threat, redolent of panic and of grainy, sepia photos of long uneven lines outside banks with now-forgotten names. His parting recommendation that night was both chilling and prescient: ‘Sell any stocks you own and don’t buy anything expensive.’ Disastrously for people the world over, both Greg and David were soon proved completely correct.

…

In part, that is because the money the bank itself has borrowed in order to lend it to you might have a different maturity to your loan, or it might have a floating interest rate versus your fixed one (or vice versa). This is ‘market risk’. But primarily, the risk comes from the fact you might not pay back the loan. This is ‘credit risk’. Away from the aeons-old business of lending money at interest, many large banks run various trading businesses, most of which use the principal model. Merrill Lynch was no exception. Merrill’s bankers traded bonds; they traded interest rate swaps; they traded loans; they traded short-dated deposits. Loic would take me around the cavernous trading floor during quieter moments and point out where all these businesses were located, their staff hunched over tightly packed rows of desks.

…

Shortly afterwards, both entities were declared bankrupt. On 6 August, the American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation (a retail mortgage lender) also went bankrupt. Ameriquest went on 31 August. By mid-September, on my side of the Atlantic and with money markets now in meltdown, the mortgage lender Northern Rock was the scene of the first bank run in the UK for 150 years. By now, volatility and fear had returned with a vengeance to equity, bond and FX markets after years of gradually increasing calm. It was clear that the previous period of unusual stability was just the water rushing from the beach before a tsunami. From late 2007 onwards, until the end of 2008, the succession of failures and forced takeovers of financial firms reads like the familiar but dolorous list of battles in a terrible, lost war: Countrywide, Bear Stearns, Indy-Mac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and on, and on.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

There are circumstances in which the very existence of an account-based CBDC could trigger a flight of deposits out of the banking system. Flight Risk A bank run occurs when depositors lose confidence in a bank and rush to withdraw their deposits. When a commercial bank faces such a “run” on its deposits, it quickly depletes its reserves and has to close its doors. The loss of confidence in a bank might be precipitated by new information about a bank’s financial position or, in some cases, by misinformation. There are historical examples of bank runs being precipitated by unfounded rumors about a bank’s solvency. Since a bank has reserves that cover only a portion of its deposits, while its assets are loans that cannot be called back or liquidated at short notice, a loss of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

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4    Bitcoin Sets Off a Revolution, Then Falters   5    Crypto Mania III    Central Bank Money   6    The Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies   7    Getting Central Bank Digital Currencies Off the Ground IV    Ramifications   8    Consequences for the International Monetary System   9    Central Banks Run the Gauntlet 10    A Glorious Future Beckons, Perhaps Notes References Acknowledgments Credits Index PART I Laying the Bedrock CHAPTER 1 Racing to the Future A book is written when there is something specific that has to be discovered. The writer doesn’t know what it is, nor where it is, but knows it has to be found.

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This is why banks are valuable to an economy. And this is also why they are subject to failure. Concerns about a bank’s financial solvency could lead to a panic-driven frenzy of deposit withdrawals. This sort of panic, which was quite common in the first half of the twentieth century, is described as a bank run. That ominous phrase literally conjures images of depositors running to a bank to be first in line in the belief that, depending on how much cash it has, the bank can afford to pay only a certain number of depositors before running out of money and shutting its doors. Unless there is a backstop, such as a government that can credibly commit to returning money to a failed bank’s depositors, such crises of confidence can spread quickly to other banks, bringing both the banking system and the economy to their knees.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

But what if, suddenly, there weren’t? Financial crises aren’t caused by bad loans. Much like a conventional bank run, crises occur when people, en masse, no longer believe that their money is safe, and so they rush to pull it out of wherever it’s invested. The reason they lose faith might be that they’re worried that a bank has too many bad loans, but it’s the act of withdrawing the funds that undermines the viability of a bank, or the entire financial system. In its simplest form, such a loss of faith manifests itself as a bank run, as in the Jimmy Stewart movie It’s a Wonderful Life, where the sight of people queuing up outside a bank branch leads others to do the same, draining the bank of its cash reserves until it can no longer satisfy depositors’ demands for their money back.

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But China has grown quite adept at dealing with conventional runs. In 2014, two rural banks in Jiangsu Province experienced a bank run that lasted for three days after a number of local underground financiers and unregulated loan shops collapsed, making people jittery about whether the local banks were exposed to the same problems. The People’s Bank of China rushed money to the branches. The bricks of freshly delivered cash were stacked up behind the tellers in order to calm nerves. The modern, more dangerous version of the bank run happens when the trust between banks themselves breaks down and they decline to continue lending to each other.

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wealth-management products: Ambrose Evans-Pitchard, “China Losing Control as Stocks Crash Despite Emergency Measures,” The Telegraph, July 27, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/11766449/China-losing-control-as-stocks-crash-despite-emergency-measures.html. to calm nerves: John Ruwitch, “How Rumor Sparked Panic and Three-Day Bank Run in Chinese City,” Reuters, March 26, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-banking-idUSBREA2P02H20140326. falling any further: Gabriel Wildau, “China’s ‘National Team’ Owns 6% of Stock Market,” Financial Times, November 25, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/7515f06c-939d-11e5-9e3e-eb48769cecab.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

So companies borrow and lend money to each other over very short periods at very low interest rates, typically swapping assets for cash and then repurchasing those assets the next day for a fee—hence “sale” and “repurchase”—or “repo.” It is cheaper than borrowing from the local bank and doesn’t involve fleets of armored trucks. What happened in 2007 and 2008 was a bank run through this repo market.5 A bank run occurs when all the depositors in a bank want their cash back at the same time and the bank doesn’t have enough cash on hand to give it to them. When this happens, banks either borrow money to stay liquid and halt the panic or they go under. The repo market emerged in the 1980s when traditional banks lost market share because of a process called “disintermediation.”6 Banks, as intermediaries, traditionally sit in the middle of someone else’s prospective business, connecting borrowers and lenders, for example, and charging fees for doing so.

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I do this so that I can ask one more question as a setup. If all the trouble was generated in the private sector, why do so many people blame the state for the crisis and see cuts to state spending as the way out of a private-sector mess? Answering that question is what concerns us in the rest of this chapter. The Generator: Repo Markets and Bank Runs The repo market is a part of what is called the “shadow banking” system: “shadow,” since its activities support and often replicate those of the normal banks, and “banking” in that it provides financial services to both the normal (regulated) banks and the real economy. Take paychecks, for example.

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This had the effect of reversing the flow of capital to Europe as US capital came home to take advantage of these higher interest rates, which unexpectedly further stoked the stock market boom.15 After all, why put your money in Germany when you can make 15 percent buying shares in an investment trust and 7 percent in a bank deposit in the USA? The resulting capital flight placed enormous pressure on the German economy, which responded with ever-stricter austerity policies, especially, as we shall see, under Chancellor Brüning in 1930–1931. Deprived of external liquidity—all the money had gone back to the United States—bank runs in Austria and Germany were met with ever-tighter austerity policies in exchange for more loans (that failed to materialize) to stave off the inevitable default. Eventually, and tragically, as loans dried up tariffs rose, currencies were devalued, and the postwar recession became the Great Depression.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

For instance, George Selgin at the Cato Institute has written that in England, it was common to have “sealed deposits” in which gold was kept entirely on hand in a vault. Other, unsealed deposits were available for lending. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Bank runs were a problem in England at the time. The first true bank wasn’t established in America until 1782 (Hammond 1957, 10). There had been a painful British bank run in 1772–1773. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Hammond 1957, 11. “As fast as specie was received, it was exported to pay for goods that could not be produced at home,” Hammond writes of the colonial years.

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If the bank was unable to meet the redemptions, it would be broken. As financial systems grew larger and more interconnected, broken banks could damage entire economies. As financial markets developed and became more complex, dash-for-cash runs in the face of trouble would remain a constant feature and threat. Bank runs were far from the only problem that dogged the financial system by the late 1700s, when America won its independence from England.[10] The foreign currencies and precious metals that the North American banking system had revolved around in colonial times were often available in finite quantities and served as a rigid superstructure for the nation’s fledgling commercial system.[11] The supply of money could struggle to expand to keep pace with rising demand for cash during wars, harvests, or economic boom times.

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Clearinghouses could help to funnel cash out of big banking centers and into rural areas where it was needed, but the system did not always work quickly or efficiently.[35] Often, dollars became concentrated in places where they were less necessary, causing a rush for cash in places with high demand for money but an insufficient supply, which set off cascading bank runs. Financial panics struck the rickety system not only in 1873 but also in 1884, 1890, and 1893.[36] The underdeveloped banking and currency system also held back the United States’ money market, preventing it from expanding to a point where it would rival England’s. In financial journalist Walter Bagehot’s seminal 1873 book, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, the author recounts that London banks held 120 million pounds of deposits around the time of publication; New York’s, just 40 million.[37] Bagehot explained in detail why that mattered: If a merchant were to use 50,000 pounds of his own money to earn 5,000 pounds over a year, he would make a 10 percent return.

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street by Kate Kelly

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, fixed income, housing crisis, index arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, moral hazard, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, technology bubble, too big to fail, traveling salesman

The day’s presentations included a talk by the trader who handled Bear’s commercial mortgage-backed securities. But in order to address “the environment,” as the e-mailed update had put it, Schwartz was added to the speaking roster at the last minute. No one paid much attention to the presentations until it was Schwartz’s turn to talk. Despite the looming bank run, the CEO appeared uncannily relaxed. Leaning back in his chair, he dismissed the chatter around Bear’s cash position, reasoning that companies like General Motors had faced similar rumor-mongering in the past that had turned out to be nothing but “noise.” Bear would come out all right, he told the group, and the key was to stay focused on the day-to-day business.

…

Bernanke addressed the subject of bankruptcy. “Can they open for business if they file?” he asked. Not in New York State, was the answer. The implications of Bear’s travails were hitting the Fed chairman hard. It was possible, he thought, to be adequately capitalized under securities laws and still face a bank run. Even if federal regulators thought you looked okay, in other words, you could still be out of business overnight. A scholar of the Great Depression, Bernanke’s thoughts turned to Credit-Anstalt, the Austrian bank that had gone bankrupt in 1931. Hoping to stabilize their teetering economy by giving confidence to bank customers, the country’s central bankers had guaranteed Credit-Anstalt’s deposits—assuring the public that even if the bank went out of business, the government would ensure that they didn’t lose their savings.

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Morgan? If it’s like that for them, what is it like for Merrill Lynch or for Thornburg Mortgage?” By then the Federal Reserve Board had gathered in its headquarters in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington and approved the emergency loan. Bernanke and his colleagues hated the thought of financing a bank run with government dollars, but they knew that helping Bear survive the day would be better than allowing it to collapse. The vote was unanimous. LATER FRIDAY March 14, 2008 10:00 A.M. Calls were pouring in to Bear’s investor-relations and financial divisions. Sequestered in his office on the sixth floor, Molinaro could hardly keep up with his phone messages.

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

In the euro area, the minimum reserve requirement was cut from an already ridiculous rate of 2 percent to 1 percent in January 2012, and in the UK it has long been abolished altogether such that British banks can decide for themselves how much cash and central bank reserves they want to keep as a safety margin to satisfy customers’ demand for cash. The reserve requirement determines how much the banks can expose themselves – or in practice, the public purse – to the risk of a bank run. The lower the reserves in proportion to the money that customers could withdraw at any time, the higher the risk of a bank run. This does not only affect the banks with the lowest reserves. If the reserve requirement is low, the banking system as a whole has low reserves in relation to potential withdrawals of cash. This is why the problems of any significant bank routinely threaten to put the entire financial system at risk.

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The government rescued it, at great cost to taxpayers, based on the argument that a bank failure would damage the public’s trust in the banking system. As government-sponsored depositor insurance systems, central banks and the prospect of bailout packages in times of need insure the banks against a bank run, a low reserve requirement is a superb MONEY IS POWER 83 deal for private banks. Using their influence, they made sure that in Europe minimum reserve requirements were continuously reduced in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the US, they engineered policies so that the reserve requirement would cover less and less of the financial sector’s money creation activities.

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Chase’s successor Hugh McCulloch extended Cooke’s monopoly. He was a close friend of Cooke’s. When McCulloch left the Treasury, he became head of Cooke’s London office. The result of the new system was a great expansion of the number of banks and of deposits but also, in short order, a series of financial crises. There were panics and bank runs in 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907 (Rothbard 1985/2008). As a reaction to these crises, the Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 upon bankers’ initiative. At a secret meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia in December 1910, they hammered out the essential features of the new Federal Reserve System. Bankers representing the interests of Rockefeller, J.P.

Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

It’s why traditional bank architecture relied so heavily on imposing granite facades and pillars to project an aura of stability and permanence in front of the fragility of finance. No financial institution can function without confidence, and confidence is evanescent. It can go at any time, for rational or irrational reasons. When it goes, it usually goes quickly, and it’s hard to get back. A financial crisis is a bank run writ large, a crisis of confidence throughout the system. People get scared and want their money back, which makes the money remaining in the system less safe, which makes more people want their money back, a self-reinforcing doom loop of fear, fire sales, capital shortfalls, margin calls, and credit contractions that can produce a stampede for the exits.

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You might have to sell the asset immediately to avoid default, and if others with similar assets hold similar fire sales, the price of the assets will drop further, triggering more fire sales and margin calls and defaults, and so on down the drain. If you happen to be a financial firm, your creditors might sour on your commercial paper, stop renewing your overnight repo loans, or force you to post more collateral, the modern equivalents of bank runs. That’s how panic spread after the housing bubble popped. Before the crisis of 2008, many large financial institutions were increasingly leveraged, in some cases borrowing more than $30 for every dollar of shareholder capital, affording very limited protection against losses. Increasing amounts of that leverage were in short-term debt that resembled uninsured bank deposits, the kind of runnable debt that uneasy creditors can withdraw at the first hint of danger.

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The Fed poured in a further $62 billion by buying Treasuries and issued a statement encouraging banks to borrow from the discount window. Even those textbook initial steps were criticized as too much too soon. Bank of England governor Mervyn King called out the ECB and the Fed for overreacting to blips in the markets. A month later, the Bank of England would provide similar liquidity after his country’s first bank run in 150 years. Inside the Fed, several Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members wanted to attach harsh conditions to discount window loans to avoid moral hazard. But Ben and Tim didn’t want to add to the stigma the banks already associated with Fed loans. We didn’t want banks to stay away from the discount window; we wanted them to take the Fed’s money and lend it out.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

An IMF paper reports that young people growing up in recessions are much more fatalistic than others, believing that effort and work are far less important in generating results than having the luck to live in good times.7 Bank crashes can even damage health directly. A study at Cambridge University found that they increase the risk of death from stress and worry.8 The customers who tried to withdraw cash from Northern Rock, Britain’s first bank run for more than a century, experienced a similar level of stress to victims of an earthquake. The capitalism that Britain developed and which crashed so spectacularly has a lot to answer for. To date, though, it has hardly even been asked any questions, let alone provided any answers. A wounded society The unbalanced structure of economic growth over the last decade has fed straight through to a disastrous social geography, bypassing the least advantaged and rewarding the wealthy.

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In reality, though, all depositors will not ask for their money back simultaneously, because they will not all need it at once. This assumption is the foundation of banking. However, should depositors lose confidence in a bank’s capacity to meet their demands, they may well all try to withdraw their money at the same time. This is what happens in a bank run. Banks are therefore pulled two ways: to be ultra-conservative in order to maintain depositors’ confidence, and the tremendous financial temptation, and commercial pressure, to be less conservative. If they can build up a position of leveraged lending to a portfolio of borrowers, especially in a class of assets that are appreciating in value, there are fortunes to be made for both financiers and their shareholders.

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At the same time, transient, footloose shareholders demanded higher and quicker profits. Caught in this pincer, even the most conservative banks started to consider higher leverage or investing in riskier assets as the only means to survive.20 Unregulated nineteenth-century banking witnessed Northern Rock-type bank runs aplenty. Famously, Overend, Gurney and Co. went belly up in 1866, prompting the great economic and political commentator Walter Bagehot to describe its senior executives as ‘sapient nincompoops’. ‘These losses’, he wrote, ‘were made in a manner so reckless and so foolish that one would think a child who had lent money in the City of London would have lent it better.’21 The bank had borrowed short, made terrible long-term lending decisions and suffered the consequences.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

In either case, a big challenge would be to manage the contagion. An exit, particularly a disorderly one, would surely trigger bank runs and capital flight from other members. It could also cause collapses in the prices of financial and other assets. A flight to safety, to Germany or beyond the Eurozone, would occur. A decisive response from the Eurozone would be required to halt the contagion. The ECB would need to act as a lender of last resort on an unlimited scale, replacing money taken out in bank runs. Interest rates on sovereign debt would need to be capped. Above all, the commitment to keep the rest of the Eurozone together would have to be reinforced.

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The programme for Cyprus had two significant features: for the first time, it imposed losses on bank creditors, notably including depositors (100 per cent losses on amounts above €100,000 in the now closed Laiki Bank and 60 per cent losses on amounts over €100,000 in the larger Bank of Cyprus), many of whom were, not coincidentally, foreign, particularly Russian; and, no less important, it inflicted controls on transfers of euros outside the country. It became even clearer than before that some euros were more equal than others. A euro deposited in a dodgy bank backed by a weak sovereign was and is not the same as a euro deposited in a solid bank supported by a strong sovereign.18 This makes the Eurozone structurally vulnerable to bank runs, since it obviously makes sense to move accounts from banks backed by weak sovereigns to banks backed by creditworthy ones, particularly at a time of crisis. It is also why informed observers concluded that some kind of banking union was essential if the Eurozone was to survive in the long run. In 2011 a far more significant event occurred than this set of crises in small countries.

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If the required net inflow of foreign financing is too large, financing will become increasingly expensive and may stop altogether, possibly suddenly. That is what happened to Greece in 2010, as was noted in Chapter Two above. A ‘sudden stop’ is the consequence of a collective decision by investors that deficits are indeed unsustainable: a stop has the characteristics of a bank run, since the decision by individual investors to withdraw funding is triggered by the perception that others are doing so. ‘Sustainability’ is, therefore, ultimately a subjective, not an objective, phenomenon. As Hamlet tells us, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Unfortunately and crucially, external sustainability is asymmetrical.

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

—Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, April 24, 2008 (in The Economist) In the 1930s, when the financial system collapsed, many people went to the bank to withdraw their money because they were scared that banks would go bankrupt and they would lose all their savings if they didn’t get there before other depositors. Banks keep a fraction of their deposits and lend the rest out, so they don’t have enough liquidity to give everyone their money on the same day. If depositors incorrectly think that a bank is in trouble, their deposit withdrawals will create a bank run and push even a very healthy bank toward failure.45 On March 6, 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a “bank holiday” and closed every bank in the country. They remained closed until Department of the Treasury officials could inspect each institution’s ledgers. Banks in viable financial condition were primed with Treasury money and permitted to do business again.

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Those in marginal condition were kept closed until they could be restored to soundness. Numerous banks that had been poorly run remained closed forever. This was one way to stop the endless cycle of banking system destruction. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was one regulatory response to the bank runs of the 1930s. Established in the Banking Act of 1933, it insured bank deposits so that depositors would not worry about losing their savings to bank failures.46 Investment banks do not have this guarantee on their customer deposits. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both failed after classic runs on the bank.

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This deal, and perhaps a deal with another suitor, would have been much more likely had the U.S. guaranteed it. 45. Mozilo, Countrywide’s CEO, pointed to a Los Angeles Times article that caused depositor panic. The next day depositors withdrew $8 billion from the bank. In nine days, depositors withdrew $16.7 billion, forcing the bank out of business. 46. This didn’t prevent bank runs in 2008, partly because many depositors had more than the $100,000 account limit and partly because, even with the guarantee, people were nervous or didn’t understand the rules. The FDIC subsequently raised the account limit to $250,000. 47. Transparent, stress-tested financial statements detailing Lehman’s exposure would have helped a great deal in the weeks leading up to Lehman’s collapse.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

With each passing day, the panic spread to new countries and new institutions, but there was nothing irrational about it. The series of bank runs that almost destroyed the world economy were perfectly reasonable responses to the self-destructive actions of the U.S. Treasury, followed by other governments around the world. As Mervyn King noted six months earlier, commenting on the Northern Rock run:39 “Once a run gets started, it is rational for other people to join in.”40 Bank runs are rational because no bank has enough ready cash to repay all its deposits. Therefore, the survival of any nation’s banking system depends ultimately on a belief that government or some other unimpeachable credit will stand behind the banks.

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First and foremost, he or she would realize that at a time of crisis all banks depend on some kind of implicit guarantee, from the government or from a quasi-public institution. Because no bank has enough ready cash to repay its depositors if they all decide simultaneously to withdraw their funds, there are only two ways to restore confidence among depositors once they start worrying about the loss of their money in a bank run. Either the bank must be able to raise a large amount of capital quickly to prove to its depositors that it remains solvent, or the depositors must be offered an unconditional guarantee from another institution whose solvency is beyond question. When an individual bank suffers, takeover by a bigger institution is often enough.

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Then, partly through ideological dogmatism and partly political timidity, he ruled out the only viable alternative, which was temporarily to offer all American banks unlimited government guarantees. The almost inevitable result was a run on every major bank and financial institution, first in America and then around the world. And after this generalized bank run had started, the only possible outcome was the ideological U-turn that occurred in the week of October 6, 2008, when the Irish, Greek, and Danish governments, followed by the British government, then the French and German governments, and finally the U.S. Treasury, gave the temporary guarantees that they could and should have offered on September 15.

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

In an effort to weaken those countries, the French government encouraged the Bank of France and other French banks to withdraw the short-term credit they had provided to Austria.103 Viewing the interconnectedness of global financial institutions and the weakness of Europe as potential threats to its domestic recovery, the United States began to study methods of relieving the pressure on the German economy. On May 11, President Hoover asked Treasury Secretary Mellon and Secretary of State Henry Stimson to look into relaxing Germany’s significant payments for war debts and reparations. A proposal was not put forth until early the next month.104 In the interim, bank runs spread throughout Europe. Hungary reported bank runs starting in May, leading to the imposition of a bank holiday.105 The German government nationalized Dresdner Bank, the nation’s second largest bank, by buying its preferred shares.106 Major financial institutions failed across Romania, Latvia, and Poland.107 Germany was facing capital flight.

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This foreshadowed FDR’s win in the presidential election two years later.90 First Quarter, 1931: Optimism Gives Way to Gloom as Economy Continues to Deteriorate At the start of 1931, economists, politicians, and other experts in both the US and Europe still retained hope that there would be an imminent return to normalcy because the problems still seemed manageable. The bank failures of the previous quarter were thought to be inconsequential, and not damaging to the overall financial system. By March, all business indexes were pointing to a rise in employment, wages, and industrial production. Bank runs led to a less than 10 percent drop in deposits.91 The news reflected growing economic confidence: on March 23, the New York Times declared that the depression had bottomed, and the U.S. economy was on its way back up.92 New investment trusts were being formed to profit from the expected “long recovery.”93 Optimism was also bolstered by the recovery of the stock market.

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This was no exception, so a week later, the New York Fed again raised its interest rate to 3.5 percent.129 Rumors flew that the head of the New York Fed, George Harrison, had asked the French not to withdraw any more gold from the United States.130 Given the domestic difficulties, investors in the US had taken to hoarding gold and cash. This led to a series of bank runs in late 1931 that caused many banks to close and resulted in a big contraction in deposits for those remaining open. As banks’ deposits fell, they began to call their loans in order to build up their cash reserves. Homes and farms were forced into foreclosure, and several companies went bankrupt as investors did not roll loans they had previously extended.131 As money and credit contracted, the economy started to fall off a cliff.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

In the speech, Kashkari questioned the usefulness and effectiveness of the measures and tools currently at our disposal and enquired if they were sufficient to deal with a future crisis, especially since we have no idea about what form it could take. In this public discussion, he presented two scenarios: Scenario One: Individual large bank runs into trouble while the rest of the economy is sound and strong. Scenario Two: One or more banks run into trouble while there is broader weakness and risk in the global economy. In Scenario One, as per Kashkari, the aforementioned measures would allow us to deal with the failure of an individual large bank without requiring a bailout, but we don’t know that for certain as the work on these measures is far from complete (refer Table 2-1).

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As such, they are responsible for ensuring how much debt is issued by commercial banks, without which they would not be able to control the supply of money. This lever of control exists in the form of capital requirements . Capital requirements play an important role in the production of debt-based money as they offer, among other things, a safeguard to a bank run. Since a bank creates money as it makes out loans, they are at risk of running out of physical currency in the case that a large number of the depositors decide to withdraw their deposits. To address this risk, commercial banks are obliged to hold some amount of currency to meet deposit withdrawals and other outflows, but using physical banknotes to carry out these large volume transactions would be extremely cumbersome.

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While all the services they provide can be grouped under the umbrellas of financing and risk mitigation, the fact that regulations can vary from geography to geography (and the lack of interoperability) means that there is always a dependence on intermediaries and repetition of processes. As stated by Lamar Wilson, CEO of Fluent, a Blockchain network for financial institutions and global enterprises, “Currently, bank-run trade finance programs require a tremendous amount of resource-intensive due diligence, document collection, and processing, including coordination of remittance information. Financing rates are high for the businesses despite the low and shrinking margins for the financing provider. This is especially true at smaller banks who lack this infrastructure and must outsource these services for their larger clients," (Harris, 2016).

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

He advised the company on structured credit, credit derivatives, and commodity futures. So he had theory and practice to give him insight. Gorton pointed out that the collapse of numerous hedge funds in the summer of 2007 had been triggered by “wholesale” panics, not “retail” panics like the bank runs of the 1880s, 1907, and the 1930s. Those bank runs ended when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created in 1934, insuring bank accounts up to one hundred thousand dollars. During the American banking world’s so-called Quiet Period—from 1934 to 2007—some banks failed and thrifts went under, but those did not contaminate the broader banking system.

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So much was taking place in world financial markets while I sat tight, safeguarding the growth of my double cargo until my December due date. The rolling disaster rippled around the world. Insomnia kept me up late. Instead of I Love Lucy reruns, I watched the BBC as thousands of Brits queued to withdraw one billion pounds from Northern Rock, the biggest UK bank run in over a century. Markets sniff out the weakest links in the system. The cost of protecting the debt of big U.S. investment banks became the train wreck I couldn’t stop watching. I began following bank credit default swaps. These insurance securities could be used to bet for or against the survival of any financial entity—for example, the sovereign debt of Iceland or the corporate bonds of General Motors.

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I’d take that back to my traders to finagle a better deal for my client. The DLJ bond desk didn’t need to pad its sizable commission at my clients’ expense. That brand of greed was one of my pet peeves about Wall Street. Dudley would later call the Bear Stearns debacle in March 2008 an old-fashioned bank run, just like that depicted in the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, played out in real time on CNBC. But it had really started in 2007, during the ten-day crisis as its hedge funds crumbled. Cayne, age seventy-three, had come under attack for being AWOL, playing a bridge tournament in Nashville instead of tending to agitated investors.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

In Chapter 18, on solutions to the financial crisis, I will share with you some ideas for dealing with this issue without losing the benefits of magnifying the economic efficiency of intermediate-size investments and small savings that banks provide. The Federal Reserve and FDIC insurance were both created to deal with the issues associated with the nature of fractional reserve banking. In the short term, these “solutions” help; in the long term, they make the problem far, far worse. FDIC insurance primarily reduces the short-term risk of bank runs because depositors perceive their deposits to be insured by the federal government. However, I previously described the fact that FDIC insurance substantially increases the credit and liquidity risk that banks take by eliminating market discipline. Based on my long-term observation of the behavior of bank executives (human nature), the existence of FDIC insurance changes the risk/return trade-offs so significantly that in the good times (when bad loans are made), bankers take risks that they would never take in a free market.

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Uninsured depositors do get paid in full on the portion of their deposits that is insured (theoretically, $100,000 is insured, but often much more is insured, as discussed previously). Until the WaMu failure, the idea had been that uninsured depositors would impose discipline on a reckless bank, knowing in advance that they could lose money in the event of a bankruptcy. The reason the FDIC and the other regulators decided to pay uninsured depositors was to avoid creating a bank run. When IndyMac had failed, the FDIC had not paid uninsured depositors in full. This created lines of depositors waiting to get their money, which were broadcast endlessly by the media. The regulators were concerned that a similar display might cause the general public to panic and demand their money out of healthy banks (remember the fractional reserve issue we discussed before).

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Even though it was sold to Wells Fargo (with the shareholders getting a small amount) and the FDIC did not suffer a loss, its sale was mandated by the FDIC and the Fed. If the government forces the sale of a company, that company has failed (fairly or not). The interesting aspect of this situation is that the negative consequences for the bond market could have been avoided and the risk of retail bank runs controlled. The FDIC could have simply absorbed the extra losses paid to the uninsured depositors. The FDIC’s mission is to protect the safety and soundness of the banking system. If covering uninsured depositors is necessary, it can do so, but it should let the losses fall on the insurance fund, not on innocent bondholders.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The fractional reserve banking system was anything but stable, all because too much gold was in the British banking system. England had become Spain, laden with gold and not enough to spend it on. So England devised a way to get rid of gold. It turned out, at least in my opinion, to be the wrong way. *** Bank runs and financial crises from too much gold became common: They occurred in 1825, 1847, 1857 and 1866. Think about it. In periods of inflation, money loses its value relative to the goods it is buying. This lack of faith in money causes people to move into real assets, including gold. Even though money was exchanged into gold at a fixed rate, the fear that the rate would change when the money lost value, caused depositors to ask for real gold from banks.

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And, in general, we may observe, that the dearness of every thing, from plenty of money, is a disadvantage, which attends an established commerce, and sets bounds to it in every country, by enabling the poorer states to undersell the richer in all foreign markets.” The best and brightest economists of the time met in Paris in 1867, to discuss a way to have both sound money and increased international trade. They came up with a system known as the “Price specie flow.” Sounds like a case of the runs, rather than a cure for bank runs. In 1870, even though England’s economic power had already peaked (but who knew?), the bankers and government officials agreed to this system - better known as the classical gold standard - since the economists were promising them a system that would naturally balance trade and keep governments from screwing up by issuing too much or too little money.

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Herbert Hoover vacuumed up whatever capital was left by increasing the top tax rate from 25 to 60 percent. In response, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned with "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." In March 1933, just after FDR’s inauguration, unemployment hit 25 percent. After yet another bank run Roosevelt declared an 8-day banking holiday after which confidence in banks returned and deposits flowed back in. Later in 1933, the U.S. dropped the gold standard, following England, which dropped it in 1931. Unshackled, money supply could now increase and replenish banks. After a yearlong recession in 1938, New Deal spending kick-started the economy.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

The result was a run on the bank, like the famous scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when depositors rush to pull their money out of a Depression-era savings and loan. Confidence is a fragile thing. When it evaporates, it usually evaporates quickly. And it’s hard to get back once it’s lost. A financial crisis is a bank run writ large, a run on an entire financial system. People lose confidence that their money is safe—whether they’re stockholders or bondholders, institutional investors or elderly widows—so they rush to pull it out of the system, which makes the money remaining in the system even less safe, which makes everyone even less confident.

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Banks under siege used to stack money in their windows to reassure depositors there was no need to run; when governments put enough “money in the window,” they can reduce the danger they’ll have to use it. The classic example is deposit insurance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to Depression-era bank runs. Since 1934, the government has guaranteed deposits at banks, so insured depositors who get worried that their bank has problems no longer have an incentive to yank out their money and make the problems worse. Of course, the banking system that FDR inherited didn’t have “collateralized debt obligations,” “asset-backed commercial paper,” or other complexities of twenty-first-century finance.

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The classic example is a bank that borrows short from its depositors, who can demand their money back at any time, and lends long to businesses and homeowners. This kind of “maturity mismatch”—the use of short-term funding to finance long-term investments—is how George Bailey got into trouble in It’s a Wonderful Life, and it’s why we now have deposit insurance to avoid bank runs. But a lot of short-term loans to financial institutions can look a lot like uninsured bank deposits, and they can run when confidence goes. When creditors call in the loans and the institutions can’t recover the money they had lent to finance longer-term investments, they can fail in a hurry. This is unfortunate if it happens to a single bank, but devastating if it happens to the banking system as a whole.

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

In the extreme case, the government could adopt a version of the 1930s “Chicago plan,” which would essentially allow banks to issue money-like instruments only if they were 100% backed by government debt, which presumably can include central bank reserves.10 The name relates to Chicago economists Henry Simon, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Irving Fisher (the last actually a Yale professor), who advocated the idea of “narrow banking” to mitigate moral hazard problems and eliminate bank runs (assuming that the government itself is fully solvent). A Chicago-type plan would mark a quantum change in the financial system and would radically reroute the way capital flows in the economy. By expanding the scope of the government’s monopoly on all retail transaction media, the government would be able to raise vast amounts of capital, essentially usurping one of the private banking system’s main funding mechanisms.

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Another common practice, even more directly analogous to a Gesell tax, was to force people to hand in coins and then give them back a smaller number of coins similar in weight and content, for example, handing in four coins and getting back three.13 Many other ways can be used to implement a crude Gesell tax. At the improbable (but instructive) end of the spectrum is the idea of creating short-stick lotteries advanced by my Harvard colleague N. Gregory Mankiw, who attributes the idea to a graduate student. Mankiw proposed that the central bank run regular lotteries based on the serial numbers of currency in circulation. Notes with the losing numbers become completely worthless. The problem is that after a couple dozen lotteries, it would be pretty difficult to identify worthless notes without a tedious serial number cross-check against the official list.

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Indeed, the idea that the gold standard produced spectacular stability is a fantasy and a false image of what the gold standard was really like. The gold standard era was punctuated by deep recessions (the recession of 1893 was in some ways almost as profound as the Great Depression of the 1930s). There were bank runs and long bouts of deflation. Nothing stopped governments from abandoning the gold standard when they desperately needed funding to pay for World War I. Once citizens realized that the gold standard might not go on forever, it proved extremely fragile. There is little reason to believe that a modern-day gold standard would fare any better.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The Overheated Economy of the 1920s Leads to the Depression of the 1930s After the depression of the 1890s there was much discussion of what had happened, and eventually corrections were made that were supposed to prevent a recurrence. Notably the Federal Reserve System was created by an act of Congress in 1913 to prevent the kind of bank run that had started the depression. The act was hailed as a “fireproof credit structure”15 and a “safeguard against business depressions.” President Woodrow Wilson, upon signing the Federal Reserve Act on December 14, 1913, was almost euphoric about its ability to stabilize the economy, and he even called the act “the constitution of peace.”16 But in fact the new system did not function as well as had been hoped.

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Confidence—and the economy itself—was not restored until World War II completely changed the dominant story of people’s lives, transforming the economy.39 Summing Up Depression History We have seen that the two most significant depressions in U.S. history were characterized by fundamental changes in confidence in the economy, in the willingness to press pursuit of profit to antisocial limits, in money illusion, and in changes in the perception of economic fairness. The depressions were intimately linked with these hard-to-measure variables. These two epochs may seem remote in history, and we may think that our economic institutions have improved enough to prevent such events from ever being repeated. Both depressions involved bank runs, and such runs now appear to be a thing of a past because of the establishment, in the 1930s, of comprehensive deposit insurance. The first of these depressions also preceded the founding of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve System; and there has been considerable development in the theory of central banking since the second depression.

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A shadow banking sector, unprotected by deposit insurance, grew up after the early 1990s in the United States, in the form of subprime lenders who supported their lending activities by issuing short-term commercial paper. Moreover, even the Federal Reserve System as it existed at the beginning of 2007 was apparently not up to the task of preventing behavior that looked very much like bank runs, as one financial institution after another failed. In response the Fed had to reinvent itself, with new lending facilities that went far beyond its original turf of depository institutions. The increasing complexity of our financial system makes it hard for economic institutions like deposit insurers or central banks to stay ahead of financial innovation.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

People prefer to put their money in a bank that isn’t losing money. In fact, banks that lose big sums of money, especially when it is unexpected, can be quickly brought down by a ‘‘run on the bank.’’ Depositors in these dramas rush to remove their money before the banks go bust, something that is sure to make it go bust. Bank runs brought down thousands of U.S. banks in the 1920s and 1930s, which is why the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was put in place to provide both oversight and deposit insurance to prevent them. But it’s not enough for banks to just avoid the rare disaster. Banks need to make enough money out of OPM to pay for the cost of running the payments system and other expenses.

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However, the simple fact is that no private clearing house has ever collapsed during a financial crisis. The history of formal regulation is less stellar. The United States has experienced two devastating structural financial crises and several lesser ones since the Federal Reserve was set up. The Northern Rock bank run in England (the first since 1866) happened after the U.K. abolished the old clearing house ‘‘club’’ and took up formal regulation. LONDON BECOMES MONEY MARKET TO THE WORLD The result of all these accidents of history was that England became the first national economy based on credit. Nothing really new in finance has been invented since.

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Borrowers walk away, leaving the bank with trash stocks. With their paper wealth wiped out, these same borrowers began defaulting on mortgages and other loans. Banks began to call in loans to raise cash, sending more customers into the tank. Soon, banks began to fail in large numbers, triggering more bank runs. Between the end of 1920 and FDR’s famous Bank Holiday of 1933, about 5,000 of America’s roughly 30,000 banks failed. Essentially, Ben Strong and the Federal Reserve Board let them fail, judging it irresponsible to bail out banks that made themselves insolvent. However, in banking, timing is everything.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Society benefits, too: long-term investments can be financed far more easily because they do not require creditors to sacrifice liquidity. The downside of maturity transformation is that a lot of creditors do sometimes want their money back at the same time. The most visible manifestation of this is the bank run, with people lining up outside branches to retrieve their cash. A bank run is the moment when the magic of maturity transformation is revealed as a cheap trick. The bank doesn’t have deposits on hand to meet demand, so the customers who turn up first are the ones who get their money back. Everyone has an interest in joining the run.

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Something unexpected was happening to the moneymaking machine. My very first week in the job coincided with a deposit run at Northern Rock, a British lender that came unstuck when it could no longer fund itself in the markets. Some of my earliest interviews on the beat were with people dusting off the manual on how to deal with bank runs. Organizing guide ropes inside bank branches was one tactic: better that than have people spill out onto the street, signaling to others that they should join the line. One HSBC veteran happily recounted stories of the financial crisis that gripped Asia in the late 1990s, when tellers were instructed to bring piles of cash into view to reassure people that banks were overflowing with money.

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The aim of these rules is twofold: first, to make sure that banks do not get into such terrible trouble again and, second, to ensure that when there is another crisis, the bill is not passed to the taxpayer. A lot of different weapons are being deployed in the service of these objectives, and despite the cries of those who say nothing has been done to hurt the banks, they are having a powerful effect. The two most important levers that regulators have to pull are liquidity and equity. Bank runs are not the only way that creditors can bring banks to their knees. Banks borrow short term in a lot of different markets and from a lot of different sources of capital. They borrow in repurchase, or “repo,” markets, pledging securities as collateral in return for cash; they borrow from money-market funds; they use commercial paper, a short-term capital-market instrument, to raise money; and so forth.

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve by Roger Lowenstein

bank run, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, corporate governance, fiat currency, financial independence, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Ida Tarbell, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, off-the-grid, old-boy network, quantitative easing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, walking around money

As Paul Warburg, one of the heroes of this story, was to observe with his trademark acuity, America’s banks resembled less an army commanded by a central staff than they did an inchoate legion of disjointed and disunited infantry. It was hardly surprising that throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the United States—alone among the industrial powers—suffered a continual spate of financial panics, bank runs, money shortages, and, indeed, full-blown depressions. This book tells the story of how, culminating in the days before Christmas 1913, the Federal Reserve came to be. It was not a gentle or an easy birth, nor was it swift. To Americans of the early twentieth century, especially farmers, the prospect of a central bank threatened the comfortable Jeffersonian principle of small government.

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A great orator though a twice-failed candidate, Bryan had no use for a commission run by Aldrich. At any rate, the Democrats backed a very different banking reform—deposit insurance. Oklahoma, a newly admitted state, had enacted deposit insurance the previous December, with the aim of discouraging bank runs. This solution dismayed orthodox bankers, who feared that insurance would serve as an invitation to reckless banking. If depositors had no reason to seek out well-managed banks, what would motivate bankers to discipline their lending? James Laughlin, author of the 1897 Indianapolis report, reacted as did many experts—with haughty disapproval.

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For instance, at Warburg’s urging, the Senate cut reserve requirements below those in the House, enabling banks to issue more loans and, again, create more money. The most controversial feature in the Senate bill was a provision for a deposit guarantee. The notion of insuring deposits as a means of forestalling bank runs had been on the margins of the debate since 1907 and, of course, was favored by Bryan. It was considered a radical step—one that would encourage imprudent banking. Nonetheless, Wall Street, which had visions of a muscular Federal Reserve that would pump up credit and arm American banks to do business overseas, preferred the Senate’s version of Glass-Owen to the House’s.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Moreover it encouraged banks to make riskier loans since they were confident that they were protected against runs by the owners of the larger deposits – if these riskier loans proved profitable, the owners of the banks would benefit and if the loans went into default, the owners would not have to worry about bank runs (although the market value of their own shares might decline and even become worthless). The implosion of the bubble in Japan in the 1990s caused the value of the loans of the banks headquartered in Tokyo and Osaka and various regional centers to decline sharply below the value of their liabilities. Nevertheless, there were no bank runs; the depositors were confident that they would be made whole by the government if any of the banks were closed. Deposit insurance has limited both bank runs and contagion in the runs from one troubled bank to other banks in a neighborhood.

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A guarantee fund of 20 million gulden was put together by the Austrian National Bank and the solid commercial banks; these imitations of earlier measures were of little assistance.37 Another moratorium was noted in Paris after the July Monarchy when the municipal council decreed that all bills payable in Paris between 25 July and 15 August should be extended by ten days. This moratorium sterilized the commercial paper in banking portfolios and did nothing to discourage a run by holders of notes.38 Clearing-house certificates The major device used in the United States to cope with bank runs prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System was the clearing-house certificate, which is a near-money substitute that was the liability of a group of large local banks. A bank subject to a run could pay the departing depositors with these certificates rather than with coin. The New York clearing-house was established in 1853 and the one in Philadelphia in 1858 after the panic of 1857.

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Morgan, Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Union Bank of Switzerland to provide $3.6 billion of capital to prevent the collapse of LTCM; in exchange they acquired 90 percent of LTCM’s equity.58 These firms were large creditors of LTCM so the ‘bailout’ involved a change in the legal nature of their claim on LTCM. The Federal Reserve was concerned that if LTCM failed the markets would be paralyzed by the need to unwind its massive position in futures and options contracts and other types of derivatives. Deposit insurance Since 1934, federal deposit insurance in the United States has prevented bank runs by providing an ex ante guarantee of deposits. Initially the deposits were guaranteed up to $10,000 but gradually the ceiling on deposits was raised in stages and eventually reached $100,000 – and then $250,000 during the 2008 crisis. When large banks got into trouble, the FDIC deliberately removed all limits on the amounts of deposits covered by the guarantee to halt imminent runs and in practice it established that banks with significant deposits over $100,000 were ‘too big to fail’ (although the shareholders of these banks would probably lose all of their money).

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

Instead, trust companies had to rely on clearinghouse banks to process checks written by their customers. Knickerbocker Trust Company, the Bear Stearns of its day, had lent heavily to the copper speculators. When word of that circulated, scores of depositors descended on its offices to withdraw money, the sort of bank run that was frighteningly frequent before government deposit insurance arrived. Never mind that just two weeks before, the state banking examiner had found the institution had funds sufficient to pay its depositors. On October 18, the National Bank of Commerce said it would no longer act as the intermediary between Knickerbocker and the clearinghouse, a move as devastating to Knickerbocker as JPMorgan Chase’s decision to stop “clearing” — or processing payments — for Lehman Brothers in September 2008, contributing to that venerable firm’s bankruptcy.

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The institution was still in its adolescence when it confronted and failed its biggest test: misstep after misstep on the Fed’s part turned a bad late-1920s recession into the Great Depression, an indictment made by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and collaborator Anna Schwartz, and later expanded by Ben Bernanke in his years as an academic. In the preface to a collection of his essays on the Depression, Bernanke described those years as “an incredibly dramatic episode — an era of stock market crashes, bread lines, bank runs, and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background all the while. Fascinating, and often tragic, characters abound during this period, from hapless policy makers trying to make sense of events for which their experience had not prepared them to ordinary people coping heroically with the effects of the economic catastrophe.”

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“In August, it crossed into the banking system. That’s when things got really complicated,” said Donald Kohn, the Fed’s vice chairman, who had long taken comfort from what Greenspan once dubbed — in another automotive metaphor — the “spare tire” theory of finance. The spare tire theory holds that when the banks run into trouble, companies and consumers can borrow directly or indirectly in credit markets where money market funds, insurance companies, pension funds, and others lend cash. Likewise, when credit markets are tight, companies and consumers can borrow from banks. Problems in one sector are offset by the other, in short, and the economy keeps right on rolling.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

When financial markets started to seize up in 2007, banks stopped lending to one another, and “the Rock” found itself unable to access international capital markets, meaning it couldn’t pay its debts. On 13 September 2007, the news broke that Northern Rock was seeking emergency support from the Bank of England: the first UK bank run since Overend. Both bank runs resulted from an asset bubble — one in railways, the other in housing. Both Northern Rock and Overend relied on borrowing from financial markets to finance their day-to-day liabilities. Both were eventually forced to appeal to the Bank of England for help. But there were also some critical differences between the two institutions.

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Adam Tooze puts it succinctly: “Without valuation these assets could not be used as collateral. Without collateral there was no funding. And if there was no funding all the banks were in trouble, no matter how large their exposure to real estate”. Retail bank runs had been a thing of the past since the introduction of deposit insurance, but what happened in 2007 was essentially a giant bank run, led by other banks, which created a liquidity crisis – the banks didn’t have enough cash to meet their current liabilities. But the fire selling that resulted rapidly turned this liquidity crisis into a solvency crisis – the banks’ debts grew larger than their assets.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Fisher identified all great depressions as starting from a point of overindebtedness: The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases: (a) the lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future; (b) the hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future; (c) the vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations; (d) the development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.15 In the case of the Great Depression, the overindebtedness originated in reckless borrowing by corporations who had been encouraged by high-pressure salesmanship of investment bankers. The collapse of the debt bubble then led to a self-perpetuating vicious circle of falling asset prices, which, as Fisher knew from experience, made it hard to repay one’s debt. It led to further distressed selling, rising bankruptcies and even bank runs as loans went bad on banks’ balance sheets. He then described the process of debt-deflation, where attempts to liquidate assets in order to reduce debts become self-defeating, as the ensuing fall in prices raises the real value of debts even more. In other words, the real cost of borrowing is the nominal interest rate minus inflation, so deflation increases the cost of debt while inflation would reduce it.

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He proposed that the central bank should simply increase the price level to near its 1926 level by expanding the money supply in line with his formulation of the Quantity Theory of Money. He also suggested stabilizing the financial system by providing a government guarantee of bank deposits to curb harmful and destructive bank runs. He believed that membership of the gold standard prevented the necessary monetary expansion since the dollars in circulation were constrained by the amount of gold. Dropping the gold standard would free the dollar and allow it to fall in value during a depression, which could boost exports and therefore the economy.

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However, the Fed believed that further loosening of monetary policy might pump up the stock market bubble and lead to inflation. Between 1930 and 1933 the US money supply contracted by over a third, coinciding with a raft of bank failures. Between October 1930 and March 1933 there were four major bank runs. Most of these occurred between August 1931 and January 1932, when there were 1,860 bank failures and the money supply fell at an annual rate of 31 per cent. As deposits were withdrawn for fear of failure, banks had less money to lend, so the supply of credit to the economy evaporated, which led to downward pressure on output and prices.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Fisher identified all great depressions as starting from a point of overindebtedness: The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases: (a) the lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future; (b) the hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future; (c) the vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations; (d) the development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.15 In the case of the Great Depression, the overindebtedness originated in reckless borrowing by corporations who had been encouraged by high-pressure salesmanship of investment bankers. The collapse of the debt bubble then led to a self-perpetuating vicious circle of falling asset prices, which, as Fisher knew from experience, made it hard to repay one’s debt. It led to further distressed selling, rising bankruptcies and even bank runs as loans went bad on banks’ balance sheets. He then described the process of debt-deflation, where attempts to liquidate assets in order to reduce debts become self-defeating, as the ensuing fall in prices raises the real value of debts even more. In other words, the real cost of borrowing is the nominal interest rate minus inflation, so deflation increases the cost of debt while inflation would reduce it.

…

He proposed that the central bank should simply increase the price level to near its 1926 level by expanding the money supply in line with his formulation of the Quantity Theory of Money. He also suggested stabilizing the financial system by providing a government guarantee of bank deposits to curb harmful and destructive bank runs. He believed that membership of the gold standard prevented the necessary monetary expansion since the dollars in circulation were constrained by the amount of gold. Dropping the gold standard would free the dollar and allow it to fall in value during a depression, which could boost exports and therefore the economy.

…

However, the Fed believed that further loosening of monetary policy might pump up the stock market bubble and lead to inflation. Between 1930 and 1933 the US money supply contracted by over a third, coinciding with a raft of bank failures. Between October 1930 and March 1933 there were four major bank runs. Most of these occurred between August 1931 and January 1932, when there were 1,860 bank failures and the money supply fell at an annual rate of 31 per cent. As deposits were withdrawn for fear of failure, banks had less money to lend, so the supply of credit to the economy evaporated, which led to downward pressure on output and prices.

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

While the fund attempts to maintain sufficient net asset value [538] (NAV) to allow exchange a unit of the fund for one of the money, a sufficient drop in NAV will be reflected in unit price. In the case of a MMA, such losses are absorbed by money reserves. If there is insufficient reserve, either because of an unexpected level of withdrawal, or because of investment losses, the MMA fails. Failure of a MMA manifests as a bank run [539] , where some people are repaid and others not. Insufficient NAV of a MMF manifests as a uniform drop in unit price. The advantage of the MMA is that its units are more fungible [540] , though still discounted against money. The advantage of the MMF is that losses are evenly spread. It is not surprising therefore that MMAs are typically insured by the taxpayer, more tightly regulated by the state, and accounted for as bank credit.

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Bank similarly did not create the offsetting credit and debt entries to obscure fraudulent money creation. Bank created these accounts for two reasons: Preclude physical transfer just to redeposit the money into Bank. Encourage redeposit into Bank as opposed to a competitor (or Borrower hoard). When Bank has insufficient reserve to satisfy withdrawals, either due to loans in default or a bank run [886] , it has only two options, default or borrow. To prevent the former, central banking [887] exists to provide the latter. This is the meaning of the term “lender of last resort ” [888] . State Banking Principle [889] provides a detailed explanation of this actual source of monetary inflation [890] .

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* * * [10] https://libbitcoin.info [11] https://bitcoincore.org [12] Chapter: Dedicated Cost Principle [13] https://www.dtu.dk/english [14] https://twitter.com [15] https://libbitcoin.info [16] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics [17] Chapter: Inflation Principle [18] Chapter: Savings Relation [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki [20] Chapter: Foreword [25] https://libbitcoininstitute.org [26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [27] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-501c3-organizations [28] Chapter: Value Proposition [51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [53] Chapter: Inflation Principle [54] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [55] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [56] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [57] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry [84] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [85] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [86] Chapter: Hearn Error [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [88] Chapter: Value Proposition [89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal [90] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [91] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [92] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [93] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [94] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [95] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [96] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [98] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [100] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [101] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [102] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [103] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [104] http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm [105] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [106] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [107] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [110] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [111] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [112] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [115] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [116] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [117] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [118] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [119] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [120] Chapter: Reservation Principle [121] Chapter: Blockchain Fallacy [122] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance [124] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rage_quit [125] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [126] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [127] Chapter: Inflation Principle [128] Chapter: Lunar Fallacy [131] Chapter: Hearn Error [132] Chapter: Value Proposition [134] Chapter: Other Means Principle [135] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [136] https://www.imf.org [137] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [138] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [139] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [140] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [141] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [142] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [143] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [144] Chapter: Hearn Error [145] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [146] Chapter: Public Data Principle [147] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [148] Chapter: Other Means Principle [149] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [150] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz [151] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [152] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/1075 [153] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [154] https://www.asicboost.com/patent [155] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [156] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [157] Chapter: Public Data Principle [158] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [159] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [160] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [161] Chapter: Value Proposition [162] Chapter: Other Means Principle [174] https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/bitcoin-vs-gold-10-crystal-clear-comparisons [175] Chapter: Stability Property [176] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [177] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [178] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [181] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [182] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer [183] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [184] Chapter: Social Network Principle [185] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)#Directed_graph [186] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) [189] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [190] Chapter: Public Data Principle [191] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [192] Chapter: Cockroach Fallacy [193] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [194] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography [195] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software [196] Chapter: Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy [201] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [203] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [204] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [205] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [206] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [207] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [208] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market [209] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177 [210] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [211] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [212] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [213] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_surface [214] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [215] Chapter: Centralization Risk [216] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [217] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [218] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer [220] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [221] Chapter: Scalability Principle [222] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [223] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [224] Chapter: Value Proposition [225] Chapter: Other Means Principle [226] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [227] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [229] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [230] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [231] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [232] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [233] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [234] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [235] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [236] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility [237] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [238] https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money/html/p/81 [246] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [247] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [248] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [249] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081616/understanding-taxes-physical-goldsilver-investments.asp [250] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [251] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [252] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate#Parallel_exchange_rate [261] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [262] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [263] Chapter: Reservation Principle [264] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [265] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [266] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [273] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [274] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [275] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [276] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [277] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [278] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [279] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [280] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [281] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [282] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System [283] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/pages/discount-rates/current-discount-rates [309] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [310] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/16/how-tight-jeans-almost-ruined-americas-money [311] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html [312] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [313] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona [314] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [315] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [316] Chapter: Value Proposition [320] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return [324] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [328] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [329] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm [330] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [331] https://www.coindesk.com/uasf-revisited-will-bitcoins-user-revolt-leave-lasting-legacy [332] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [337] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [338] Chapter: Stability Property [339] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [340] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [341] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [342] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [343] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [344] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [345] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [346] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [347] http://primecoin.io [349] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox [351] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [352] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function [356] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [357] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value [358] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [359] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake [360] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [361] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [362] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [364] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [365] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function [366] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp [367] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [368] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [369] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [370] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [371] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring [372] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [375] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [376] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win-win_game [377] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [379] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [380] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [381] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [382] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [385] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [386] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [387] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [388] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [389] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [390] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [391] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [392] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [393] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [394] https://www.federalreserve.gov [395] Chapter: State Banking Principle [396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement [397] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [398] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note [399] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [400] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [401] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund [404] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [405] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [406] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [407] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [410] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [411] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf [413] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [414] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [416] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility [418] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [419] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam [420] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [423] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [424] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [425] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [426] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [427] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [428] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system [429] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [430] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [431] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [432] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [433] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [434] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin [435] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [436] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [437] Chapter: Brand Arrogation [438] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core [439] https://libbitcoin.info [440] Chapter: Maximalism Definition [441] Chapter: Custodial Risk Principle [443] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function [444] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [446] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [447] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [448] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [450] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [451] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [452] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham's_law_(Thiers'_law) [453] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [460] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [461] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [462] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [463] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [464] Chapter: Network Effect Fallacy [465] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [466] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [467] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [474] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [475] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [476] Chapter: Substitution Principle [478] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [479] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [482] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [483] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [484] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [485] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf [486] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [487] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [488] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [489] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [490] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [491] Chapter: Other Means Principle [495] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [496] Chapter: Value Proposition [497] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [498] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [499] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [500] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [501] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [502] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [503] Chapter: State Banking Principle [504] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org [505] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance [507] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [508] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics) [509] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [510] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [511] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [515] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [516] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/996 [517] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [518] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves [519] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [520] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Money_creation_by_commercial_banks [521] Chapter: State Banking Principle [522] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/default.htm [543] Chapter: Savings Relation [544] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [545] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [548] Chapter: Production and Consumption [561] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [562] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [563] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [564] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [565] Chapter: Production and Consumption [566] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [569] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [570] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [571] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [572] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [573] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [574] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking [602] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [603] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [604] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining [605] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [607] Chapter: Risk Free Return Fallacy [635] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [636] Chapter: Production and Consumption [637] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [639] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [640] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [641] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [642] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [643] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [644] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [645] Chapter: Savings Relation [646] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [647] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility [648] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [649] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [650] Chapter: Production and Consumption [651] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [652] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [653] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [654] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/926 [655] Chapter: Expression Principle [656] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [657] Chapter: Pure Bank [658] Chapter: Reservation Principle [659] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [661] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [662] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [663] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [664] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [665] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [666] Chapter: Pure Bank [667] Chapter: Reserve Definition [668] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend [677] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [678] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve [679] https://www.fdic.gov [680] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [681] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [682] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [683] Chapter: Inflation Principle [684] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [685] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation [686] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [687] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage [688] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) [689] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [690] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_(finance) [691] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [692] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [693] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest [699] Chapter: Savings Relation [700] Chapter: Inflation Principle [704] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [705] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [706] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [707] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/989 [708] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement [709] Chapter: Expression Principle [715] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [726] Chapter: Savings Relation [727] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [732] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [733] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [734] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [735] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [739] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [740] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [741] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [742] Chapter: Inflation Principle [756] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [757] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [758] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [759] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [760] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange [761] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [762] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [763] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity [764] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [765] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [766] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [767] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [779] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [780] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [788] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [789] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [790] Chapter: Stability Property [791] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [797] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [798] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power [799] Chapter: Inflation Principle [803] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money [808] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [809] https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contractual+Claim [810] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [811] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization [812] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote [813] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate [814] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [815] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/electronic-money.asp [816] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [819] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money [823] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [824] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [825] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [826] Chapter: Reserve Definition [827] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem [828] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [829] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [830] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [831] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [833] Chapter: Collectible Tautology [837] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [838] Chapter: Savings Relation [843] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate [844] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [855] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [856] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [857] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [858] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [860] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [861] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [874] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_past_each_other [875] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [876] Chapter: Value Proposition [877] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallism [878] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [879] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism [880] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [886] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run [887] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [888] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [889] Chapter: State Banking Principle [890] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [891] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation [892] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [893] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [894] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [895] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [897] Chapter: Inflation Principle [898] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [899] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [901] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [905] https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 [906] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [907] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [908] Chapter: Stability Property [909] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx [910] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product [911] https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 [912] Chapter: Stock to Flow Fallacy [913] Chapter: Reservation Principle [914] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [915] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [916] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/949 [917] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [918] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [919] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [920] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [921] Chapter: State Banking Principle [922] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [923] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [924] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [931] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [932] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [933] https://voxeu.org/index.php?

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

The panic created more panic in a process Krugman said was similar to a microphone in an auditorium generating a ‘feedback loop’: ‘sounds picked up by the microphone are amplified by the loudspeakers’.22 These sounds are then amplified and increased until a deafening noise is created. The idea that a panic creates its own momentum is implicit in the phenomenon of a ‘bank run’, in which the prospect of a bank collapse actually causes this to happen, as depositors, doubtful of a bank’s solvency, remove their deposits, thereby damaging the bank. The feedback loop or bank run is essentially a circular process: it might be called a vicious circle. In the case of Thailand, the loss of investor confidence and the ensuing collapse in the value of the baht forced the central bank of Thailand to increase interest rates to defend the currency.

…

Richards, the Deputy Governor of the Bank, remembered that ‘on Monday morning [12 December] the storm began, and till Saturday night it raged with an intensity that it is impossible for me to describe’.14 During that month, sixty county banks failed, more than half of them collapsing as a consequence of the failures of the London bank Pole & Co. and of Wentworth & Co., a leading Yorkshire bank. On 14 December, Pole & Co. stopped payment, which put forty of its correspondent county banks out of business.15 Pole & Co. had been put under pressure by an old-fashioned bank run, when depositors simply withdrew their money from the bank. The bank failures were only the last development of what had been a tumultuous year. The South American mining stocks also collapsed in dramatic fashion. One man caught up in the excitement of the stock market bubble was the young Benjamin Disraeli, a twenty-year-old Jewish adventurer, determined to make a name for himself in literature.

…

The panic had seen banks, fearful for their own solvency, cashing in their banknotes for gold at the Bank of England and then, notoriously, refusing to supply their own customers with gold. This double standard aroused the ire of the young Cambridge economist. ‘Our system’, he wrote, ‘was endangered, not by the public running on the banks, but by the banks running on the Bank of England.’ As a result of this ‘internal run’, the central bank’s gold reserves had fallen from £17.5 million to £11 million in three days.41 The predicament of the banks, as described by Patrick Shaw Stewart, was acute. The ‘main difficulty in two words’, as this clever young banker saw it, was ‘to prop up those big houses who have debts owing from Germany which will never be paid, and, if they go under, to prevent the whole City coming down like a pack of cards’.42 The public, once the banks had suspended gold payments for customers, received paper money, notes issued by the British Treasury for everyday purposes, with denominations of £1 and 10 shillings (50p in modern terms).

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Indeed, my recent book, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (The Penguin Press HC, 2010) shows that financial crises and economic crises driven by irrational exuberance of the financial system and the private sector—unrelated to public policies—existed for centuries before fiscal deviant sovereign and central banks distorted private-sector incentives. Markets do fail, and they do fail regularly in irrationally exuberant market economies; that is the source of the role of central banks and governments in preventing self-fulfilling and destructive bank runs and collapses of economic activity via Keynesian fiscal stimulus in response to collapse in private demand. The fact that these monetary policies and fiscal policies may eventually become misguided—creating moral hazard and creating large fiscal deficits and debt—does not deny the fact that private market failures—independent of misguided policies—triggered asset and credit bubbles that triggered a public rescue response.

…

Rothbard described the scene facing Cleveland in that terrible year: Poor Grover Cleveland, a hard money Democrat, assumed the presidency in the middle of this monetary crisis. Two months later, the stock market collapsed, and a month afterward, in June 1893, distrust of the fraction reserve banks led to massive bank runs and failures throughout the country. Once again, however, many banks, national and state, especially in the West and South, were allowed to suspend specie payments. The panic of 1893 was on.13 Despite long speeches by Bryan and other pro-silver members of the House, on August 28, 1893, the lower chamber voted 239–108 to repeal the Sherman Act.

…

“It was this interpretation of the episode that provided the prime impetus for the monetary reform movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act.”19 The Crisis of 1907 One of the key events that drove the mounting public demand for monetary reform was the Crisis of 1907, an event that was a century in the making but was also the result of a growing economy that had far outgrown its financial system. Unlike previous panics, the troubles started in March, not during the autumn farm harvest season, and would last the entire year and beyond. The New York Stock Exchange went into a drastic decline, leading to public panic and depositor runs on banks. These bank runs, in turn, led to large-scale liquidations of “call loans,” short-term loans used to finance stock market purchases, causing further declines in stock prices and widespread insolvency for businesses and individuals. Because the reaction to crisis by banks and the entire financial system was to limit the availability of deposits when a liquidity run occurred, the flow of payments through the U.S. economy slowed, causing personal and commercial insolvencies to soar.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

One day in that period someone came to see me in the glass koala to tell me that there were queues at the banks, bank runs had begun and the markets had concluded that it was the end for the Hong Kong dollar’s link to the US dollar. Well, if the end had come, I thought I had better go and see it. I went downstairs and walked through Admiralty and stopped at every bank I could find. What I saw were indeed the large queues of people that I had been told about. However, it was not a bank run. Yes, there were people withdrawing their Hong Kong dollar deposits and switching to US dollar deposits. However, there were also plenty of local people who were switching from US dollars to Hong Kong dollars given the very attractive interest rates then on offer.

…

It was not disclosed whether the owner had been receiving a monetary yield on the dress over the course of their ownership. Part Three: Devaluation and crisis The Timeless Explosion of Fantasy’s Dream 3 July 1997, Thailand When the controlling shareholder of the largest commercial bank in Thailand publicly forecasts bank runs, times are not normal. This is exactly what Chatri Sophapanich did on Wednesday, 18 June. This was the clearest possible indication that the financial system could not survive a deflation and thus the authorities would have to opt for the only other alternative – a devaluation. The tumble in the market up to that date had been caused by a growing belief that the Thai government was prepared to follow the deflationary option.

…

A portfolio investor who did not expect those short-term loans to be rolled over could expect very large capital outflows to be driven by bankers, and who really knew when that might end. There was a clear incentive for portfolio investors to use the liquidity available in the financial markets to exit their exposure to Asia before the bankers were able to do so. What was happening in Asia was in effect a modern form of a bank run involving foreign bankers and portfolio investors instead of bank depositors. It had been a similar problem that had impacted Mexico in 1995 and Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the US House of Representatives, had described as “the first crisis of the 21st century”. It was indeed true that the role of portfolio investors, in a new era of free movement of capital, made this crisis very different from the others that the IMF had dealt with since its inception in 1945.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

Contents Preface Chapter 1: How Credit Slipped Its Leash Opening Pandora’s Box Constraints on the Fed and on Paper Money Creation Fractional Reserve Banking Run Amok Fractional Reserve Banking Commercial Banks The Broader Credit Market: Too Many Lenders, Not Enough Reserves Credit without Reserves The Flow of Funds The Rest of the World Notes Chapter 2: The Global Money Glut The Financial Account How It Works What Percentage of Total Foreign Exchange Reserves Are Dollars? What to Do with So Many Dollars? What about the Remaining $2.8 Trillion?

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EXHIBIT 1.3 Currency Outside Banks Source: Federal Reserve, Flow of Funds Although this new paper money was no longer backed by gold (or by anything at all), it still served as the foundation upon which new credit could be created by the banking system. Fifty trillion dollars worth of credit could not have been erected on the 1968 base of 44 billion gold-backed dollars. Fractional Reserve Banking Run Amok The other constraint on credit creation at the time the Federal Reserve was established was the requirement that banks hold reserves to ensure they would have sufficient liquidity to repay their customers’ deposits on demand. The Federal Reserve Act specified that banks must hold such reserves either in their own vaults or else as deposits at the Federal Reserve.

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In order to understand how reserve requirements limited credit creation, it is first necessary to understand how credit is created through Fractional Reserve Banking. Fractional Reserve Banking Most banks around the world accept deposits, set aside a part of those deposits as reserves, and lend out the rest. Banks hold reserves to ensure they have sufficient funds available to repay their customers’ deposits upon demand. To fail to do so could result in a bank run and possibly the failure of the bank. In some countries, banks are legally bound to hold such reserves, while in others they are not. A banking system in which banks do not maintain 100 percent reserves for their deposits is known as a system of fractional reserve banking. In such a system, by lending a multiple of the reserves they keep on hand, banks are said to create deposits.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Bearing in mind that ‘local’ means something different in the virtual and mundane cases: in the physical world, community is rooted in geography, but in the virtual world we each belong to many communities Technology is not a barrier to any of these options, to central banks or to anyone else. The idea of a central bank running something like M-Pesa but for citizens is hardly far-fetched. There are tens of millions of M-Pesa users in Kenya, and Facebook can manage well over a couple of billion accounts, so I am sure the Bank of England could download an app from somewhere to run a few million accounts for post-Brexit Britain.

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Non-bank financial institutions in particular would benefit from being able to hold funds in central bank money as opposed to in the form of an uninsured bank account. Incidentally, Dyson and Hodgson (2016) remark that the existence of digital fiat (as we will see in chapter 6) might well exacerbate bank runs, as people, for whatever reason, retreat from other forms of liquidity to risk-free central bank money. The existence of risk-free digital currency in the United Kingdom could plausibly lead to an inflow of funds from foreign banks in sterling digital cash, and that, in turn, could push up exchange rates.

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Design features such as size limits on payments in and holdings of CBDC would reduce but not eliminate these concerns. An account-based CBDC – with payments through the transfer of claims recorded on an account – could increase risks to financial intermediation. It would raise funding costs for deposit-taking institutions and facilitate bank runs during periods of distress. Again, careful design and accompanying policies should limit these risks, but they will not completely erase them. The ECB reckon that introducing this type of CBDC to the eurosystem would mean going from the 10,000 accounts it has now to perhaps half a billion.36 This speech caught my attention because, as you will have deduced from part 1 of this book, I think Lagarde is right to mention state-backed tokens as an option.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

President Woodrow Wilson, by contrast, wanted clearer political control and more centralization—he figured the institution would have democratic legitimacy only if political appointees in Washington were put in charge. The Senate, meanwhile, dabbled with approaches that would put the Federal Reserve even more directly under the thumb of political authorities, with the regional banks run by political appointees as well. But for all the apparent disagreement in 1913, there were some basic things that most lawmakers seemed to be in harmony about: There needed to be a central bank to backstop the banking system. It would consist of decentralized regional banks. And its governance would be shared—among politicians, bankers, and agricultural and commercial interests.

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The banking crisis spread to Europe when Credit-Anstalt, one of Vienna’s largest and most important banks, failed spectacularly in May 1931, as years of lending for questionable projects caught up with it. The Austrian government guaranteed the bank’s deposits—and suddenly found its own creditworthiness in question. The global bank run was on. If Credit-Anstalt could collapse, what about similarly overextended banks in Amsterdam and Warsaw? Or in Frankfurt and Munich? When large-scale withdrawals began at the major German banks, the Reichsbank was in an impossible position. A collapse of the German banking system would be a catastrophe for the economy.

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For the past several weeks, Northern Rock PLC, a bank based in the North East of England with £100 billion in assets, had been in crisis. Its business was to issue mortgages, which would then be packaged and sold on financial markets—and since August, mortgage securities had been toxic to global investors. Northern Rock faced a cash crunch, as depositors discovered just how bad its situation was, a classic bank run. Television news programs showed ominously long lines of Northern Rock customers waiting to pull their deposits. “You don’t want to be the ones in the end of the queue that the money’s run out,” an uncertain customer said to the cameras outside a branch in Reading. In a palatial Moorish hall, the governor of the Bank of England and the chancellor of the exchequer watched from afar—on TV, just like many of those Northern Rock customers determined not to be in the end of the queue when the money ran out.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

In the summer of 2007, long lines of depositors started forming outside the bank Northern Rock in London. It was the first bank run in Britain since 1866. Ironically, the panic started when the Bank of England said Northern Rock was in fine shape and that it would stand by the bank. Problems can only be believed when they are officially denied. Immediately customers were alerted to problems and demanded the return of their deposits.34 Every depositor was behaving in a perfectly rational way, yet when all of them showed up to get their cash at the same time, they were causing the very bankruptcy they sought to avoid. (A bank run happens when customers try to withdraw more money from the bank than the bank can provide.

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(A bank run happens when customers try to withdraw more money from the bank than the bank can provide. Banks do not keep all customer deposits available in cash for immediate withdrawal, and instead the money is lent out.) Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, once noted that it may not be rational to start a bank run, but it is rational to participate in one once it has started. It is illogical for you not to pull your money out of a bank when you're worried about the bank's solvency, but it is also illogical for everyone to pull their money at the same time, as that itself brings the bank down. The idea of the fallacy of composition applies in the field of energy as well.

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When Morgan died, the New York Stock Exchange closed until noon in his honor; it had previously only been closed to honor the passing of kings and presidents.1 He was the “boss of bosses” during the Gilded Age, and he singlehandedly saved the nation from economic collapse during the Panic of 1907. The Panic arose when the New York Stock Exchange fell 50% and bank runs ensued across the country. Morgan devised a plan to shore up the banking system with his personal money, and cash from wealthy friends and institutions. He provided liquidity to the country when America's own treasury failed. This outraged the nation – how could one man have gained such immense power and control?

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

After three years of legislative wrangling, in 1913, the 63d Congress passed Public Law 63-43, “An Act to Provide for the Establishment of Federal Reserve Banks, to Furnish an Elastic Currency, to Afford Means of Rediscounting Commercial Paper, to Establish a More Effective Supervision of Banking in the United States, and for Other Purposes.”6 President Wilson signed the Act in December 1913, making the United States the last major economy to create a central bank. It replaced financier J. P. Morgan as the nation’s pillar of economic strength and financial stability after another bank run, in 1908, revealed the weakness and instability of a system without a central bank. The initial mandate of the Fed was only to maintain the stability of the American banking system. There were two ways to guard against repeated and destructive bank runs: first, to provide deposit insurance to every bank customer, and second, to create a lender of last resort that could help maintain the money supply and stable prices. Initially, the Fed was supposed to perform both functions; but later, in 1933, Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, to take over the former.

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Yet that narrative actually feeds a mega debt supercycle that will pummel all our assumptions about wealth preservation and growth. When recessions or financial crises occur, macroeconomists always try to guide economies clear of a Great Depression. No one wants a repeat of the 1930s. Countless movies and books have documented that terrible time, from breadlines and bank runs to ruined investors leaping from window ledges on Wall Street. In an economist’s lexicon, the Depression saw deflation at its ugliest. Although markets were already unsettled, the stock market crash on October 24, 1929, dubbed Black Thursday, marked the start of the Great Depression. In an instant, fortunes vanished.

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If central banks alter the role of banks, investors in the financial sector will pay a stiff price, never mind the consequences for industries built up to service banks. The second systemic risk: for banks that hold on to deposits in normal times, a financial panic could trigger catastrophe. Depositors seeking safety would race to move their bank deposits into their central bank accounts, triggering bank runs. Less obvious pitfalls lurk. They sound arcane but the consequences could produce convulsive financial results. Suppose a severe recession drives real interest rates below zero. If a bank charges interest on deposits, instead of paying interest, consumers can say thanks very much, we’ll store the cash in mattresses and skip the interest payment.

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

What is necessary is that five years from now Europeans are capable of traveling freely in Europe, the euro is on track to survive as the common currency of at least some of the member states, and citizens are able both to elect their governments freely and to sue them in Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights. “Who speaks of victory?” asks the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “To endure is all.” But even enduring will not be easy. If the union collapses, the logic of its fragmentation will be that of a bank run and not of a revolution. The EU’s implosion does not have to result from a victory of “exiters” over “remainers” in state referenda; it will more likely be an unintended consequence of the union’s long-term dysfunction (or perceived dysfunction), compounded by a misreading by elites of national political dynamics.

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What I argue, instead, is that in a political construction like the EU, where you have a lot of common policies, you have far fewer common politics. Where nobody can prevent member states voting on issues that can dramatically affect other states in the union, an explosion of national referendums is the fastest way to make the union ungovernable. Such an explosion could even trigger a “bank run” that could catalyze the breakup of the union. Europe can’t exist as a union of referendums because the EU is a space for negotiation while referendums are the final word of the people that preclude further negotiations. Referendums are therefore political instruments that can be easily misused by both Euroskeptical minorities and euro-pessimistic governments to block the work of the union.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

But a bond-market panic is particularly pernicious because it can force even a solvent government to default, because it may not be able to raise funds quickly enough to meet its obligations. In that respect, a bond-market panic is like a bank run, where a dash for cash by depositors (or a refusal of other lenders to refinance its debts) can force even a solvent bank that can’t raise funds fast enough to fail. Bank runs used to be common and crippling until the central bank began stepping in as a “lender of last resort”, providing solvent banks with liquidity (cash loans secured against their assets). This not only ensured that solvent banks wouldn’t be felled by a liquidity crisis; it also stopped most bank runs from happening altogether, since depositors knew that the central bank stood ready to lend if necessary.

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After inconclusive elections in May, Greece was due to hold a re-run on 17 June. Syriza, a far-left party that wanted to renegotiate the country’s EU-IMF programme while remaining in the euro, looked set to win, with eurozone policymakers threatening to force Greece out if it did. That prospect was accelerating the slow-motion bank run across southern Europe, threatening a full-on stampede. Such was the fragmentation of eurozone financial markets that a creditworthy hotel in South Tirol (Italy) had to pay three percentage points more for a bank loan than its equivalent in North Tirol (Austria) – if it could borrow at all. In effect, the single market had shattered.

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Some believe the panacea is for southern European countries to reintroduce their own currencies. These would promptly depreciate, forcing them to default: a 25-per-cent depreciation would swell their euro-denominated debt burden by a third in their new currency; redenominating it would constitute a default too. Reintroducing a currency in the midst of a crisis would also provoke chaos: bank runs, lost savings, mass bankruptcies. But in any case, is devaluation really the solution? It hasn’t worked for Britain. Another solution, suggested by George Soros as a fallback option, is for Germany (or all the creditor countries) to leave the euro.316 The beauty of his proposal is that since southern Europe would keep the euro, it would not be forced to default, but that as the euro depreciated against the new Deutsche Mark, its debt burden in D-Mark terms would fall, imposing losses on Germany.

Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

A bank can charge compound interest, for example, on its loan, whereby interest incurred is added to the principal loan and further interest charged upon both the principal and the additional interest on an ongoing basis.72 The bank has not paid any equivalent interest to any saver in order to create the loan – it has simply created a highly profitable stream of income backed by nothing more than the perceived ability of the borrower to repay the loan or the collateral owned by the borrower (for example their home).* This is not to say that the bank has not provided a valuable service to the borrower by extending credit, and so therefore some profit is justified by the increased liquidity risk that the bank runs as a result of the additional credit. If the bank needs to obtain additional central bank reserves to maintain liquidity it will incur additional funding costs. However, it should be noted that such liquidity risk may in the end be directly or indirectly underwritten by the community. 3.4.3.

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Typically, a bank will have many long-term and thus illiquid assets (e.g. 25 year-mortgage loans) whilst at the same time having many short-term liquid liabilities (i.e. customer deposits) which can be drawn down on demand. If confidence in a bank falls, this mismatch can become a problem. Customers may decide to rapidly withdraw their deposits en masse (a ‘bank run’), either by withdrawing cash, or by requesting electronic transfers across to accounts at other banks. In this situation, the bank can rapidly run out of both cash and central bank reserves. The bank can try to quickly sell off its loans in order to bring in the central bank reserves it needs to pay other banks, but if investors have concerns about the quality of the loans they are likely to force down the price of the loans and pay below the ‘book’ value of those loans.

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* Balances up to £85,000 per person per banking group are guaranteed by the Government under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Prior to October 2007 only the first £2,000 was fully covered, with 90 per cent of the next £33,000 covered. The guarantee was progressively raised during the financial crisis to try to maintain depositors’ confidence and prevent any further bank runs after the run on Northern Rock. * For a classic account of the money multiplier, see Phillips (1920)19. For an explanation of how the system used to work in the United States, see: Nicols. (1992/1961)20 * The Financial Services Authority is currently bringing in legislation that will require Banks to hold an amount determined by ‘stress testing’ the potential for 100 per cent outflows of liabilities over a two-week period.24 † In the United States, for example, there is still a 10 per cent liquidity reserve ratio on certain deposits and in China the Government actively changes its liquidity reserve ratio in an attempt to restrain credit creation in order to fight inflation – at the time of writing it stood at 20.5 per cent (having been raised for the fourth time in 2011.

Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions by Joshua Rosenbaum, Joshua Pearl, Joseph R. Perella

accelerated depreciation, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, impact investing, intangible asset, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, performance metric, risk free rate, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, time value of money, transaction costs, yield curve

While the data room is continuously updated and refreshed with new information throughout the auction, the aim is to have a basic data foundation in place by the start of the second round. Access to the data room is typically granted to those buyers that move forward after first round bids, prior to, or coinciding with, their attendance at the management presentation. Prepare Stapled Financing Package The investment bank running the auction process (or sometimes a “partner” bank) may prepare a “pre-packaged” financing structure in support of the target being sold. The staple, which is targeted toward sponsors, was a mainstay in auction processes during the LBO boom of the mid-2000s. Although prospective buyers are not required to use the staple, historically it has positioned the sell-side advisor to play a role in the deal’s financing.

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Although prospective buyers are not required to use the staple, historically it has positioned the sell-side advisor to play a role in the deal’s financing. Often, however, buyers seek their own financing sources to match or “beat” the staple. Alternatively, certain buyers may choose to use less leverage than provided by the staple. EXHIBIT 6.7 General Data Room Index To avoid a potential conflict of interest, the investment bank running the M&A sell-side sets up a separate financing team distinct from the sell-side advisory team to run the staple process. This financing team is tasked with providing an objective assessment of the target’s leverage capacity. They conduct due diligence and financial analysis separately from (but often in parallel with) the M&A team and craft a viable financing structure that is presented to the bank’s internal credit committee for approval.

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In addition, once the LPs have received the return of every dollar of committed capital plus the required investment return threshold, the sponsor typically receives a 20% “carry” on every dollar of investment profit. 116 LPs generally hold the capital they invest in a given fund until it is called by the GP in connection with a specific investment. 117 The investment bank running an auction process (or sometimes a “partner” bank) may offer a pre-packaged financing structure, typically for prospective financial buyers, in support of the target being sold. This is commonly referred to as stapled financing (“staple”). See Chapter 6: M&A Sale Process for additional information. 118 Alternatively, the banks may be asked to commit to a financing structure already developed by the sponsor. 119 The financing commitment includes: a commitment letter for the bank debt and a bridge facility (to be provided by the lender in lieu of a bond financing if the capital markets are not available at the time the acquisition is consummated); an engagement letter, in which the sponsor engages the investment banks to underwrite the bonds on behalf of the issuer; and a fee letter, which sets forth the various fees to be paid to the investment banks in connection with the financing.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This system usually works as intended, though it is vulnerable to sudden panic or bank runs: if people begin to distrust the bank, too many of them may ask to withdraw their money at one time and they will exhaust the bank’s supply of liquid funds.1 Even then, and even if there is no deposit insurance, if the government allows the bank to suspend liquidity temporarily, then depositors will still in all likelihood eventually get paid most of what they were owed, as the bank converts some of its illiquid holdings into cash. Bank regulators in modern times attempt to further reduce the problem of bank runs by demanding that banks maintain an adequate amount of reserves (cash in the vault or deposits at other banks, to make good immediately on any sudden withdrawals by depositors) and of capital (the total cushion of assets, after subtracting liabilities, available to make good on promises to depositors), so that they will not put the government in the position of having to bail out the banks.

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Berk and Green (2004). 13. Bogle (2009): 47. 14. Levine (1997). 15. French (2008). 16. Goetzmann et al. (2002). 17. Dugan et al. (2002). 18. Dugan (2005). 19. Acharya et al. (2010). 20. Kaufman (2005): 313. 21. Bernasek (2010): 48. Chapter 3. Bankers 1. Diamond and Dybvig (1983) lay out the issue of bank runs as a problem of multiple equilibria in a model of banks as creators of liquidity, thereby providing both a clear rationale for the existence of banks and an understanding of their vulnerabilities. 2. http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/bms/issue/61/download/130/section10.p Table 130. 3. There were some forms of capital requirements before 1982, but no national systematic and regular enforcement of them for banks until then.

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List, and Ulrike Malmendier. 2011. “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure.” Unpublished paper, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley. De Waal, Frans. 1990. Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Douglas, and Philip Dybvig. 1983. “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity.” Journal of Political Economy 91(3):401–19. Dixit, Avinash K., and Robert S. Pindyck. 1994. Investment under Uncertainty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Djilas, Milovan. 1982 [1957]. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

One of the most experienced investors there went so far as to suggest to the organizers that they ‘dispense altogether with an outside speaker next year, and instead offer a screening of Mary Poppins’.6 Yet the mention of Mary Poppins stirred a childhood memory in me. Julie Andrews fans may recall that the plot of the evergreen musical revolves around a financial event which, when the film was made in the 1960s, already seemed quaint: a bank run - that is, a rush by depositors to withdraw their money - something not seen in London since 1866. The family that employs Mary Poppins is, not accidentally, named Banks. Mr Banks is indeed a banker, a senior employee of the Dawes, Tomes Mousley, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. At his insistence, the Banks children are one day taken by their new nanny to visit his bank, where Mr Dawes Sr. recommends that Mr Banks’s son Michael deposit his pocket-money (tuppence).

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Between 1343 and 1360 no fewer than five Medici were sentenced to death for capital crimes.31 Then came Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. It was his aim to make the Medici legitimate. And through hard work, sober living and careful calculation, he succeeded. In 1385 Giovanni became manager of the Roman branch of the bank run by his relation Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici, a moneylender in Florence. In Rome, Giovanni built up his reputation as a currency trader. The papacy was in many ways the ideal client, given the number of different currencies flowing in and out of the Vatican’s coffers. As we have seen, this was an age of multiple systems of coinage, some gold, some silver, some base metal, so that any long-distance trade or tax payment was complicated by the need to convert from one currency to another.

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By the time money has been deposited at three different student banks, M0 is equal to $100 but M1 is equal to $271 ($100 + $90 + $81), neatly illustrating, albeit in a highly simplified way, how modern fractional reserve banking allows the creation of credit and hence of money. The professor then springs a surprise on the first student by asking for his $100 back. The student has to draw on his reserves and call in his loan to the second student, setting off a domino effect that causes M1 to contract as swiftly as it expanded. This illustrates the danger of a bank run. Since the first bank had only one depositor, his attempted withdrawal constituted a call ten times larger than its reserves. The survival of the first banker clearly depended on his being able to call in the loan he had made to his client, who in turn had to withdraw all of his deposit from the second bank, and so on.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

For Berlin, there was little that constituted systemic risk in the Cyprus situation, and German officials complained that “if Cyprus is systemic, then everything is systemic.” By contrast, many policy makers in France, but also in Italy and Spain, feared that penalization of Cypriot depositors might lead to a bank run in other countries (including their own). The Cyprus crisis changed Europeans’ attitude toward bailouts. The new chair of the Eurogroup, the Netherlands finance minister Jeroen Dijss-elbloem, spoke of the Cyprus approach as offering a “template.” Even outside Europe, it looked like an attractive solution to the problems created in the wake of the financial crisis.

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Because of this funding structure, capital flows into the periphery could dry up and reverse quickly. Still, this is not a feature unique to international capital flows, as much within-country funding is also interbank and wholesale. Just consider, for example, Northern Rock, a UK bank that suffered a bank run in 2007. It was reliant on wholesale funding, and it was precisely this reliance that made Northern Rock so vulnerable to a run. Other UK banks also relied on wholesale funding, but the larger banks had European subsidiaries that had access to ECB liquidity at a time when the Bank of England was reluctant to provide liquidity out of moral hazard concerns.

…

Government Guarantees Governments may decide to issue blanket guarantees for domestic bank assets. If this guarantee is credible, then any liquidity-related problems will immediately dissipate. Government guarantees of this sort are generally not viewed as a crisis measure; basic kinds of deposit insurance are in place in many advanced economies, motivated as a means of staving off bank-run dynamics and so ensuring coordination on the good equilibrium. The Irish crisis experience, however, shows that extended government guarantees may also function as a crisis response tool that goes beyond fixing a liquidity problem and the taxpayer eventually may have to foot the bill. At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the Irish government extended existing deposit insurance schemes to a two-year blanket guarantee for the liabilities of all Irish banks, including all sorts of deposits, senior unsecured debt, subordinated debt, and asset-covered securities.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

In 1995, in return for support of the “pro-market reformer” Boris Yeltsin, for example, Russian tycoons snatched up the valuable firms at bargain-basement prices. At the auction of the prize oil company Yukos, the Yeltsin government excluded bids from foreign buyers, eliminating most deep-pocket competitors. The Yeltsin government also allowed the banks running the auction to bid on the properties they themselves were auctioning. So Mikhail Khodorkovsky could bid on the auction of Yukos, even though he owned the bank running the auction, Menatep. Russian privatization chief Alfred Kokh alleged that Khodorkovsky used the money of Yukos itself to bid for Yukos, perhaps by pledging future oil deliveries in return for loans. He managed to buy 77 percent of Yukos shares for $309 million in December 1995.8 This was a pretty good deal for a company that by 2003 reached a market valuation of $30 billion.9 Khodorkovsky joined the top ranks on Forbes ’s annual billionaires list.

…

The IMF’s approach is simple. A poor country runs out of money when its central bank runs out of dollars. The central bank needs an adequate supply of dollars for two reasons. First, so that residents of the poor country who want to buy foreign goods can change their domestic money (let’s call it pesos) into dollars. Second, so those poor-country residents, firms, or governments who owe money to foreigners can change their pesos into dollars with which to make debt repayments to their foreign creditors. What makes the central bank run out of dollars? The central bank not only holds the nation’s official supply of dollars (foreign exchange reserves), it also makes loans to the government and supplies the domestic currency for the nation’s economy.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

The Chinese government might bar its banks from handling bitcoin-related transaction services or declare that only the yuan be used within the nation’s borders, but it can’t shut down bitcoin, which resides nowhere and everywhere. The same challenge faces any government. This was appealing to a marginal but not insignificant subculture of passionate, highly motivated activists who are skeptical of central-bank-run fiat money. More broadly, it was consistent with a trend toward decentralization and individual empowerment in the broader economy, a world in which people are renting out their sofas to paying guests, selling solar-generated power back to the grid, and drawing their news from decentralized forums such as Twitter.

…

The EU did this to ensure that private-sector investors who’d made risky bets on Greece shouldered some of the burden of the bailout that German and other euro-zone taxpayers were bearing. Cyprus’s overleveraged banks were an unintended casualty of that and were now faced with the terrifying threat of a bank run by their large Russian depositors. The dramatic solution, one endorsed by Germany and its EU partners, who were equally reluctant to bail out Russian oligarchs, was that the government in Nicosia would freeze deposits and confiscate 10 percent of them to pay for a bank bailout. This unprecedented step sent shock waves around the world.

…

He told his online correspondents to keep their eyes on two particular bitcoin addresses via a live, online blockchain monitor and that he would transfer 424,242.424242* bitcoins between them. It was the cryptocurrency equivalent of the old “wall of money” that bank managers of years past would put behind their tellers to dissuade panicked depositors from engaging in a bank run. After he moved such a large amount of coins, the maneuver had its desired effect. Such a massive handover of bitcoins suggested Mt. Gox was more flush than everyone feared. Three years later the blockchain-embedded history of this exercise, in which Karpelès effectively identified those addresses as belonging to Mt.

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos

bank run, Berlin Wall, centre right, death of newspapers, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, income inequality, moral hazard, plutocrats, urban planning

German politicians renewed public deliberations over whether it would be best to eject Greece from the eurozone. “Grexit” became a frequently used word. Greeks started removing cash from their bank accounts over fears that ATM machines would soon start spitting out worthless drachmas. The severe bank run that resulted and the deepening cycle of doubt did not create an environment conducive to economic recovery, which of course made Greece’s problems even worse. In the next election, New Democracy, which depicted itself as the safe choice for voters wishing to remain in the euro, eked out a narrow victory, and on account of a parliamentary seat bonus afforded to the party with the plurality of votes, was able to form a coalition government that included its former rival, PASOK.

…

Given the discordant impasse between the two sides, doubts over Greece’s future in the eurozone once again intensified. “Grexit” reemerged in the lexicon, and even as many Greeks heralded Syriza’s bold stance toward the Troika, concerned Greek depositors began transferring their euros out of the country, stoking fears of another crippling bank run. Meanwhile, the state’s income rapidly eroded as many Greek taxpayers, anticipating Syriza would ease their burden, simply stopped paying, leaving the new government, just weeks in office, struggling desperately to make its debt payments and avoid default. Running out of time and money, Syriza’s leaders—like their predecessors—were compelled to yield to the creditors.

…

In one of the pictures, a young Mavrommatis in an embroidered dress and white shoes stood next to the restaurant entrance looking happily at the camera while her handsome, grinning father embraced her. The restaurant had been in the family for four generations, and despite Greece’s economic problems, business still seemed to be going okay. The instability of the previous few months—two parliamentary elections within a month, massive protests, a bank run over fears the country would exit the euro—were developments that tended to discourage foreign visitors, and Greece that year suffered the consequences with regard to tourism. Still, the island received a loyal mix of affluent Athenians and foreign returnees. When Ilias joined me at the table, he told me he didn’t know why the police wrote them up for what he said were eleven violations.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

If depositors lose confidence in the bank and demand their money back all at once, the bank will be unable to meet its obligations. A run on deposits will follow. Such crises of confidence started in northern Italy in the late Middle Ages when this so-called fractional reserve banking became the norm. A vivid description of how bank runs arose comes from a contemporary Venetian account in the sixteenth century: The following year, 1584, I heard of the failure of the Pisani and Tiepolo bank for a very large sum of money. This was caused chiefly by the bankruptcy of one Andrea da l’Osta, a Tuscan, a Pisan, and a very rich merchant, who had lived in our city for many years.

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The bank kept going for a few days, paying them off as best it could, but in the end the crowd of creditors increased and the bank collapsed and failed, to the detriment of numberless people and great damage to this market, which was without a bank for four years, so that business shrank to an unbelievable extent. The Republic felt the effects of this, and took very extensive measures, but to no avail.36 Today, bank runs usually take a different form. Big depositors such as companies, pension funds and other financial institutions simply decide not to renew lending lines or certificates of deposit, so an ailing bank finds that its sources of funds dry up. Notwithstanding that, the British bank Northern Rock actually experienced in 2007 an old-style run in which worried retail depositors queued up outside branches to withdraw their money.

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Wilson) 1, 2 Alberti, Leon Battista 1 Alessandri, Piergiorgio 1 Allen, Maurice 1 Ambassadors, The (Henry James) 1 Americans for Tax Reform 1 Anatomy of Change-Alley (Daniel Defoe) 1 Angell, Norman 1 Anglosphere 1, 2 Arab Spring 1 Aramaic 1 arbitrage 1 Argentina 1 Aristotle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 art 1 Asian Tiger economies 1 Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) 1 Austen, Jane 1 Austrian school 1 aviation 1 Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) 1 Bair, Sheila 1 Balloon Dog (Orange) (sculpture) 1 Balzac 1 Bank for International Settlements 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Bank of England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bank runs 1 bankers 1, 2 bankruptcy laws 1, 2 Banks, Joseph 1 Banksy 1 Barbon, Nicholas 1, 2, 3 Bardi family 1 Barings 1 Baruch, Bernard 1, 2 base metal, transmutation into gold 1 Basel regulatory regime 1, 2, 3 Baudelaire, Charles 1 Baum, Frank 1 behavioural finance 1 Belgium 1, 2 Bell, Alexander Graham 1 Benjamin, Walter 1 Bernanke, Ben 1, 2, 3 Bi Sheng 1 Bible 1 bimetallism 1 Bismarck, Otto von 1 Black Monday (1987) 1 black swans 1 Blake William 1, 2, 3 Bloch, Marcel 1 Bloomsbury group 1, 2 Boccaccio 1 bond market 1 bonus culture 1 Bootle, Roger 1 Boston Tea Party 1 Boswell, James 1 Boulton, Matthew 1 Bowra, Maurice 1 Brandeis, Louis 1 Bretton Woods conference 1 British Land (property company) 1 British Rail pension fund 1 Brookhart, Smith 1, 2 Brunner, Karl 1 Bryan, William Jennings 1 Bubble Act (Britain 1720) 1 bubbles 1, 2, 3 Buchanan, James 1 Buffett, Warren 1, 2, 3 Buiter, Willem 1 Burdett, Francis 1 van Buren, Martin 1 Burke, Edmund 1, 2 Burns, Robert 1 Bush, George W. 1, 2 Butler, Samuel 1 Candide (Voltaire) 1 Carlyle, Thomas 1, 2, 3 Carnegie, Andrew 1 Carville, James 1 cash nexus 1 Cash Nexus, The (Niall Ferguson) 1 Cassel, Ernest 1, 2 Catholic Church 1, 2, 3 Cecchetti, Stephen 1 Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, (London School of Economics) 1 central bankers 1 Cervantes 1 Chamberlain, Joseph 1 Chancellor, Edward 1 Chapter 11 bankruptcy 1 Charles I of England 1, 2 Charles II of England 1 Chaucer 1 Cheney, Dick 1 Chernow, Ron 1 Chicago school 1, 2 Child & Co. 1 China 1, 2 American dependence on 1, 2 industrialisation 1, 2, 3 manufacturing 1 paper currency 1 Christianity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Churchill, Winston 1 Cicero 1, 2 Citizens United case 1 Cleveland, Grover 1 Clyde, Lord (British judge) 1 Cobden, Richard 1, 2, 3, 4 Coggan, Philip 1 Cohen, Steven 1 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 1, 2 Cold War 1 Columbus, Christopher 1 commodity futures 1 Companies Act (Britain 1862) 1 Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels) 1 Confucianism 1, 2, 3 conquistadores 1 Constitution of Liberty, The (Friedrich Hayek) 1 Coolidge, Calvin 1, 2, 3 Cooper, Robert 1 copyright 1 Cort, Cornelis 1 Cosimo the Elder 1 crash of 1907 1 crash of 1929 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 creative destruction 1, 2 credit crunch (2007) 1, 2, 3 cum privilegio 1 Cyprus 1, 2 Dale, Richard 1, 2 Dante 1 Darwin, Erasmus 1 Das Kapital (Karl Marx) 1 Dassault, Marcel 1 Daunton, Martin 1 Davenant, Charles 1, 2, 3 Davies, Howard 1 debt 1 debt slavery 1 Decameron (Boccaccio) 1 Defoe, Daniel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Dell, Michael 1 Deng Xiaoping 1, 2 derivatives 1 Deserted Village, The (Oliver Goldsmith) 1, 2, 3 Devil Take the Hindmost (Edward Chancellor) 1 Dickens, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 portentously named companies 1 Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Werner Sombart) 1 A Discourse of Trade (Nicholas Barbon) 1 Ding Gang 1 direct taxes 1, 2 Discorsi (Machiavelli) 1 diversification 1 Dodd–Frank Act (US 2010) 1, 2, 3 ‘dog and frisbee’ speech 1 dot.com bubble 1, 2, 3, 4 Drayton, Harley 1 Dumas, Charles 1, 2 Dürer, Albrecht 1 Duret, Théodore 1, 2 Dutch East India Company 1 Duttweiler, Gottlieb 1 Dye, Tony 1 East of Eden (film version) 1 Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes) 1, 2 Edison, Thomas 1, 2 efficient market hypothesis 1 electricity 1 Eliot, T.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Most of the storefront was brick, with large glass windows, a double wooden door, and three ATM machines perched on the stone sidewalk out front. Marina counted at least thirty people lined up at the machines, not pushing and shoving yet but clearly restless. “What is this?” Marina said. “It’s the bank run before the bank run.” Marina realized she probably should have been paying more attention during the protracted conversation the night before. She knew that things were bad, that Cyprus, like many of the more economically challenged nations of the EU, was in major debt—and that the continent’s financial leaders had been meeting in Brussels to figure out how to handle the situation.

…

“More than twenty thousand account holders at Laika, the second largest bank in Cyprus, are going to have half of their savings taken away,” Tyler said. “The Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank, is going to take almost fifty percent of all deposits over a hundred thousand.” “They’re calling it a tax, or levy,” Cameron said. “They’re closing all the banks to keep it from turning into a bank run.” “Look at this picture,” Tyler said. “This is a mob outside one of the banks. A bunch of people got hold of a bulldozer. It looks like they’re going to try to get inside.” “Nobody is going to feel safe keeping their money in an EU bank after this. No one is going to feel safe keeping money in any bank, period.”

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

Having bought time, Ponzi was as industrious as he was unscrupulous in using it. He set out to try to use his lies and fake assets to take control of some real wealth. Those who live by the sword tend to die by it. Ponzi’s scheme was fated to collapse in the equivalent of a bank run, but while he was operating it he was not averse to using threats of bank runs as a weapon of his own. At the height of his scheme, the Securities Exchange Corporation’s cash balances (which were held on hand as short-term bank deposits, ostensibly to keep them ready to pay cash for postal coupons) were a significant percentage of the local money supply in Boston and its surrounding area.

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Either point of view is defensible, because the S&L crisis was, in reality, at least two crises, and the policy measures which, partly successfully, aimed to solve the first arguably helped to bring about the second. The crisis had its roots in the 1970s and the attempt to tame inflation by raising interest rates. Savings and Loans (also known as ‘thrifts’) were a kind of small bank which had grown up in the pioneer era, taking deposits and making loans in a small local area. The legacy of bank runs and instability in the early days of the USA had, before the 1980s, left a legacy of mistrust of large or multi-branch operations, but the S&Ls had strict limits on what they could do and tended to operate in uncompetitive local markets. For this reason, it was felt that they didn’t need much scrutiny from bank examiners.

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

By doing so, it is possible to reveal not only how and why LIBOR became so important in the first place, but also how and why it came to be perceived as an objective number that was impossible to manipulate. In short, how LIBOR became an illusion.3 *** A financial crisis tends to be associated with fears of a bank run. If customers desperately begin to withdraw their deposits from a bank, it can quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you think that others will become afraid that the bank will run out of cash, it might be rational to empty your own savings account first. The typical illustration of a bank run is a picture of a very long queue outside a bank branch or an ATM. The images look similar, whether they are black and white and taken in New York or Berlin during the 1930s, outside Northern Rock in Newcastle in 2007, or somewhere in Greece during the summer of 2015.

…

The individual LIBOR quotes, by contrast, were announced daily and therefore served as snapshots of the perceived creditworthiness of the banks. A unique thing with banks is that they inherently always have a desire to appear ‘good and sound’. If depositors lose confidence in the ability of the bank to meet its obligations, there could be a bank run around the corner and the bank could face the risk of being wiped out altogether. Even the slightest of suspicions could cause a sharp decline in the stock price. The problem with the LIBOR fixing mechanism resulted from the individual LIBOR rates being public knowledge (i.e. fully transparent) at the same time as the actual funding rate was private knowledge (i.e. secret).

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional