IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fednep/y2009ijulp19-30nv.15no.1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why did FDR's bank holiday succeed?

Author

Listed:
  • William L. Silber

Abstract

After a month-long run on American banks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed a Bank Holiday, beginning March 6, 1933, that shut down the banking system. When the banks reopened on March 13, depositors stood in line to return their hoarded cash. This article attributes the success of the Bank Holiday and the remarkable turnaround in the public's confidence to the Emergency Banking Act, passed by Congress on March 9, 1933. Roosevelt used the emergency currency provisions of the Act to encourage the Federal Reserve to create de facto 100 percent deposit insurance in the reopened banks. The contemporary press confirms that the public recognized the implicit guarantee and, as a result, believed that the reopened banks would be safe, as the President explained in his first Fireside Chat on March 12, 1933. Americans responded by returning more than half of their hoarded cash to the banks within two weeks and by bidding up stock prices by the largest ever one-day percentage price increase on March 15--the first trading day after the Bank Holiday ended. The study concludes that the Bank Holiday and the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 reestablished the integrity of the U.S. payments system and demonstrated the power of credible regime-shifting policies.

Suggested Citation

  • William L. Silber, 2009. "Why did FDR's bank holiday succeed?," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 15(Jul), pages 19-30.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednep:y:2009:i:jul:p:19-30:n:v.15no.1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/09v15n1/0907silb.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/09v15n1/0907silb.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. William L. Silber, 2007. "Introduction to When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy," Introductory Chapters, in: When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy, Princeton University Press.
    2. Lockwood, Larry J & Linn, Scott C, 1990. "An Examination of Stock Market Return Volatility during Overnight and Intraday Periods, 1964-1989," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(2), pages 591-601, June.
    3. Charles W. Calomiris & Eugene N. White, 1994. "The Origins of Federal Deposit Insurance," NBER Chapters, in: The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, pages 145-188, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. French, Kenneth R. & Roll, Richard, 1986. "Stock return variances : The arrival of information and the reaction of traders," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 5-26, September.
    5. Wigmore, Barrie A., 1987. "Was the Bank Holiday of 1933 Caused by a Run on the Dollar?," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 47(3), pages 739-755, September.
    6. Temin, Peter & Wigmore, Barrie A., 1990. "The end of one big deflation," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 483-502, October.
    7. Awalt, Francis Gloyd, 1969. "Recollections of the Banking Crisis in 1933," Business History Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 43(3), pages 347-371, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Inflation and Fiscal Policy
      by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets on 2016-09-12 18:01:59

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chwieroth, Jeffrey M. & Walter, Andrew, 2019. "The financialization of mass wealth, banking crises and politics over the long run," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100765, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Jenter, Dirk & Aldunate, Felipe & Korteweg, Arthur & Koudijs, Peter, 2021. "Shareholder Liability and Bank Failure," CEPR Discussion Papers 16309, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Gary Gorton, 2015. "Stress for Success: A Review of Timothy Geithner's Financial Crisis Memoir," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 53(4), pages 975-995, December.
    4. Camera, Gabriele & Gioffré, Alessandro, 2024. "Financial contagion and financial lockdowns," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 218(C), pages 613-631.
    5. Jonathan D. Rose, 2015. "Old-Fashioned Deposit Runs," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2015-111, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sebastian Edwards, 2015. "Academics as Economic Advisers: Gold, the ‘Brains Trust,’ and FDR," NBER Working Papers 21380, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. David M. Walsh, 1998. "Evidence of Price Change Volatility Induced by the Number and Proportion of Orders of a Given Size," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 23(1), pages 39-55, June.
    3. Peter Reinhard Hansen & Asger Lunde, 2005. "A Realized Variance for the Whole Day Based on Intermittent High-Frequency Data," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 3(4), pages 525-554.
    4. Pei-Hwang Wei, 1992. "Intraday Variations In Trading Activity, Price Variability, And The Bid-Ask Spread," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 15(3), pages 265-276, September.
    5. Edwards, Sebastian, 2020. "Change of monetary regime, contracts, and prices: Lessons from the great depression, 1932–1935," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    6. Linton, O. & Wu, J., 2016. "A coupled component GARCH model for intraday and overnight volatility," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1671, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    7. Gaurav Raizada & Vartika Srivastava & S. V. D. Nageswara Rao, 2020. "Shall One Sit “Longer” for a Free Lunch? Impact of Trading Durations on the Realized Variances and Volatility Spillovers," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 18(1), pages 1-28, March.
    8. Ya-Chi Huang & Chueh-Yung Tsao, 2018. "Discovering Traders’ Heterogeneous Behavior in High-Frequency Financial Data," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 51(4), pages 821-846, April.
    9. Charles Calomiris, 2009. "Banking Crises and the Rules of the Game," NBER Working Papers 15403, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Sebastian Edwards, 2018. "Finding equilibrium: on the relation between exchange rates and monetary policy," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), The price, real and financial effects of exchange rates, volume 96, pages 81-107, Bank for International Settlements.
    11. Insana, Alessandra, 2022. "Does systematic risk change when markets close? An analysis using stocks’ beta," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    12. Jaremski, Matthew & Mathy, Gabriel, 2018. "How was the quantitative easing program of the 1930s Unwound?," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 27-49.
    13. Sebastian Edwards, 2017. "The London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933 and the End of the Great Depression," Open Economies Review, Springer, vol. 28(3), pages 431-459, July.
    14. Marta Khomyn, 2020. "Essays on Modern Market Structure," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 2-2020, January-A.
    15. Xiao, Xijuan & Yamamoto, Ryuichi, 2020. "Price discovery, order submission, and tick size during preopen period," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    16. Min Dai & Peifan Li & Hong Liu & Yajun Wang, 2016. "Portfolio Choice with Market Closure and Implications for Liquidity Premia," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(2), pages 368-386, February.
    17. Calomiris, Charles W. & Mason, Joseph R. & Weidenmier, Marc & Bobroff, Katherine, 2013. "The effects of reconstruction finance corporation assistance on Michigan's banks' survival in the 1930s," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 526-547.
    18. Taylor, Jason E. & Neumann, Todd C., 2013. "The effect of institutional regime change within the new deal on industrial output and labor markets," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 582-598.
    19. Linton, Oliver & Wu, Jianbin, 2020. "A coupled component DCS-EGARCH model for intraday and overnight volatility," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 217(1), pages 176-201.
    20. Tong, Bin & Diao, Xundi & Wu, Chongfeng, 2015. "Modeling asymmetric and dynamic dependence of overnight and daytime returns: An empirical evidence from China Banking Sector," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 366-382.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednep:y:2009:i:jul:p:19-30:n:v.15no.1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.