Fighting Financial Crises: Learning from the Past

If you’ve got money in the bank, chances are you’ve never seriously worried about not being able to withdraw it. But there was a time in the United States, an era that ended just over a hundred years ago, when bank customers had to pay close attention to the solvency of the banking system, knowing they might have to rush to retrieve their savings before the bank collapsed. During the National Banking Era (1863–1913), before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, widespread banking panics were indeed rather common.

Yet these pre-Fed banking panics, as Gary B. Gorton and Ellis W. Tallman show, bear striking similarities to our recent financial crisis. Fighting Financial Crises thus turns to the past to better understand our uncertain present, investigating how panics during the National Banking Era played out and how they were eventually quelled and prevented. The authors then consider the Fed’s and the SEC’s reactions to the recent crisis, building an informative new perspective on how the modern economy works.

Gary B. Gorton is the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and professor of finance at Yale University School of Management and a research associate of the NBER. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Maze of Banking: History, Theory, Crisis. Ellis W. Tallman is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He has published extensively on macroeconomics, economic forecasting, and historical episodes of financial crisis in several top journals.