Which evidence best shows the crisis from the perspective of ordinary workers rather than financiers?

There is real room for disagreement about which cause mattered most. Historians disagree over the relative roles of monetary institutions, structural ...

National aggregates conceal households that lost jobs or access to deposits and communities with different recoveries. Economic averages hide families...

Railroad finance, credit contraction and monetary controversy interacted with weakening confidence. The mechanisms were financial; the lived consequen...

Who was this intervention really designed to protect?

The rescue of a firm does not imply that its investments were sound or that losses disappeared. Rescuing a firm from panic doesn't make its decis...

An international investment boom made distant political and fiscal risks relevant to the stability of a major financial center. Distant risk had becom...

The support operation revealed just how interconnected the financial center was. London financiers and the Bank of England coordinated support to redu...

Which financing practices made large infrastructure projects especially sensitive to changes in confidence?

A crisis followed by weak conditions should not be reduced to one afternoon's market news. Long downturns are rarely explained by one dramatic tr...

The international dimension makes the familiar national story less tidy. International financial strains and domestic industrial development intersect...

Bank and brokerage failures transmitted uncertainty through markets dependent on continuing financing. Once funding froze, the trouble spread past the...