When should authorities lend, and when must an institution be allowed to fail?

Crisis doctrine always looks clearer when written after the disaster. Treating lender-of-last-resort doctrine as fully settled before this panic misre...

The failure must be read against the firm's business choices and the wider structure of discount-market liquidity. The trouble was not only panic...

The collapse unsettled confidence in London's financial markets and became a landmark in discussions of crisis management. London's reaction...

Which link in the credit network turned a local shock into a broader panic?

Different regions and economic groups experienced the downturn unevenly. Households did not experience this crisis in the same way as financiers.

A visible failure can trigger a crisis without being its only cause; fragility often accumulates beforehand. A headline failure is often the spark, no...

Railroads and trade exposures carried trouble across institutional boundaries. Railroad exposure, bank balance sheets and international commercial dev...

How do you price a future everyone is desperate to believe in?

A transformative technology can generate valuable assets and a speculative overbuilding cycle at the same time. The eventual usefulness of railways do...

Promoters' promises deserved as much scrutiny as the tracks themselves. Some railway projects created lasting infrastructure while investors in o...

Parliamentary authorization, land acquisition and construction costs made each scheme economically distinct. Even brilliant infrastructure can be fina...