IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gii/giihei/heidwp10-2014.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Crisis of 1866

Author

Abstract

The collapse of Overend Gurney and the ensuing Crisis of 1866 was a turning point in British financial history. The achievement of relative stability was due to the Bank of England’s willingness to offer generous assistance to the market in a crisis, combined with an elaborate system for maintaining the quality of bills in the market. We suggest that the Bank bolstered the resilience of the money market by monitoring leverage-building by money market participants and threatening exclusion from the discount window. When the Bank refused to bailout Overend Gurney in 1866 there was panic in the market. The Bank responded by lending freely and raising the Bank rate to very high levels. The new policy was crucial in allowing for the establishment of sterling as an international currency.

Suggested Citation

  • Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2014. "The Crisis of 1866," IHEID Working Papers 10-2014, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp10-2014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.graduateinstitute.ch/pdfs/Working_papers/HEIDWP10-2014.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stefano Ugolini, 2011. "Foreign exchange reserve management in the 19th century: The National Bank of Belgium in the 1850s," Working Paper 2011/07, Norges Bank.
    2. Guillermo A. Calvo, 1998. "CAPITAL FLOWS AND CAPITAL-MARKET CRISES: The Simple Economics of Sudden Stops," Journal of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 35-54, November.
    3. Schwartz, Anna J., 2009. "Money in Historical Perspective," National Bureau of Economic Research Books, University of Chicago Press, number 9780226742298, July.
    4. Accominotti, Olivier, 2012. "London Merchant Banks, the Central European Panic, and the Sterling Crisis of 1931," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 72(1), pages 1-43, March.
    5. Vincent Bignon & Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2012. "Bagehot for beginners: the making of lender‐of‐last‐resort operations in the mid‐nineteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 65(2), pages 580-608, May.
    6. Marc Flandreau, Stefano Ugolini, 2011. "Where It All Began: Lending of Last Resort and the Bank of England during the Overend, Gurney Panic of 1866," IHEID Working Papers 04-2011, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    7. Anders Ögren & Lars Fredrik Øksendal (ed.), 2012. "The Gold Standard Peripheries," Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-0-230-36231-4, February.
    8. Vincent Bignon & Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2009. "Bagehot for beginners: The making of lending of last resort operations in the mid-19th century," Working Paper 2009/22, Norges Bank.
    9. Bordo,Michael D. & Roberds,William (ed.), 2013. "The Origins, History, and Future of the Federal Reserve," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107013728, January.
    10. Stefano Ugolini, 2012. "Foreign Exchange Reserve Management in the Nineteenth Century: The National Bank of Belgium in the 1850s," Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions, in: Anders Ögren & Lars Fredrik Øksendal (ed.), The Gold Standard Peripheries, chapter 6, pages 107-129, Palgrave Macmillan.
    11. Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2013. "Where It All Began: Lending of Last Resort and Bank of England Monitoring During the Overend-Gurney Panic of 1866," Post-Print hal-01293916, HAL.
    12. Stefano Ugolini, 2010. "The international monetary system, 1844-1870: Arbitrage, efficiency, liquidity," Working Paper 2010/23, Norges Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Calomiris, Charles W. & Flandreau, Marc & Laeven, Luc, 2016. "Political foundations of the lender of last resort: A global historical narrative," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 48-65.
    2. Clemens Jobst & Kilian Rieder, 2016. "Principles, circumstances and constraints: the Nationalbank as lender of last resort from 1816 to 1931," Monetary Policy & the Economy, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), issue 3, pages 140-162.
    3. Stefano Ugolini, 2014. "Comment on: “Floating a “lifeboat”: The Banque de France and the crisis of 1889” by P.C. Hautcoeur, A. Riva, and E.N. White," Post-Print hal-01293759, HAL.
    4. Anson, Mike & Bholat, David & Kang, Miao & Thomas, Ryland, 2017. "The Bank of England as lender of last resort: new historical evidence from daily transactional data," Bank of England working papers 691, Bank of England.
    5. Frederic S. Mishkin & Eugene White, 2014. "Unprecedented actions: the Federal Reserve’s response to the global financial crisis in historical perspective," Globalization Institute Working Papers 209, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
    6. del Río, Fernando & Lores, Francisco-Xavier, 2023. "Accounting for Spanish economic development 1850-2019," MPRA Paper 116025, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Laurence Alan Krause, 2019. "Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street: An Interpretation," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 51(4), pages 572-580, December.
    8. del Río, Fernando & Lores, Francisco-Xavier, 2023. "Accounting for spanish economic development 1850–2019," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 121(C).

    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. Calomiris, Charles W. & Flandreau, Marc & Laeven, Luc, 2016. "Political foundations of the lender of last resort: A global historical narrative," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 48-65.
    2. Hautcoeur, Pierre-Cyrille & Riva, Angelo & White, Eugene N., 2014. "Floating a “lifeboat”: The Banque de France and the crisis of 1889," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 104-119.
    3. Olivier Accominotti & Delio Lucena‐Piquero & Stefano Ugolini, 2021. "The origination and distribution of money market instruments: sterling bills of exchange during the first globalization," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(4), pages 892-921, November.
    4. Stefano Ugolini, 2012. "The origins of foreign exchange policy: the National Bank of Belgium and the quest for monetary independence in the 1850s," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 16(1), pages 51-73, February.
    5. Agostino, Mariarosaria & Errico, Lucia & Rondinella, Sandro & Trivieri, Francesco, 2022. "On the response to the financial crisis of 1914: The Bank of England's discount policy," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(4), pages 290-307.
    6. Gianni Toniolo & Eugene N. White, 2015. "The Evolution of the Financial Stability Mandate: From Its Origins to the Present Day," NBER Working Papers 20844, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Rodríguez Braun, Carlos, 2014. "La banca y las crisis financieras en la literatura popular: Una fortuna peligrosa, de Ken Follett /Banking and Financial Crises in Popular Literature: A Dangerous Fortune, by Ken Follett," Estudios de Economia Aplicada, Estudios de Economia Aplicada, vol. 32, pages 201-222, Enero.
    8. Jobst, Clemens & Ugolini, Stefano, 2014. "The coevolution of money markets and monetary policy, 1815-2008," Working Paper Series 1756, European Central Bank.
    9. Gary B. Gorton & Guillermo L. Ordoñez, 2014. "How Central Banks End Crises," PIER Working Paper Archive 14-025, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.
    10. Mike Anson & David Bholat & Miao Kang & Ryland Thomas, 2017. "The Bank of England as Lender of Last Resort: New historical evidence from daily transactional data," Working Papers 0117, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    11. Anson, Mike & Bholat, David & Kang, Miao & Rieder, Kilian & Thomas, Ryland, 2019. "The Bank of England and central bank credit rationing during the crisis of 1847: frosted glass or raised eyebrows?," Bank of England working papers 794, Bank of England.
    12. Monnet, Eric & Velde, François R., 2020. "Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics," CEPR Discussion Papers 15348, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    13. Alessio Moro & Galo Nuño & Pedro Tedde, 2015. "A twin crisis with multiple banks of issue. Spain in the 1860s," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 19(2), pages 171-194.
    14. Kilian Rieder & Michael Anson & David Bholat & Miao Kang & Ryland Thomas, 2018. "Frosted glass or raised eyebrow? Testing the Bank of England’s discount window policies during the crisis of 1847," Working Papers 18020, Economic History Society.
    15. Stefano Ugolini, 2011. "Foreign exchange reserve management in the 19th century: The National Bank of Belgium in the 1850s," Working Paper 2011/07, Norges Bank.
    16. Accominotti, Olivier & Ugolini, Stefano, 2019. "International Trade Finance From the Origins to the Present: Market Structures, Regulation, and Governance," CEPR Discussion Papers 13661, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    17. Gary Gorton & Guillermo Ordoñez, 2016. "Fighting Crises," NBER Working Papers 22787, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Stephen Quinn & William Roberds, 2015. "Responding to a Shadow Banking Crisis: The Lessons of 1763," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(6), pages 1149-1176, September.
    19. Marc Flandreau & Gabriel Geisler Mesevage, 2014. "The Separation of Information and Lending and the Rise of Rating Agencies in the United States," IHEID Working Papers 11-2014, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    20. Frederic S. Mishkin & Eugene White, 2014. "Unprecedented actions: the Federal Reserve’s response to the global financial crisis in historical perspective," Globalization Institute Working Papers 209, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bagehot; Bank of England; Lending of last resort; Supervision; Moral hazard; Discount; Overend Gurney Panic; Baring.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:gii:giihei:heidwp10-2014. 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: Dorina Dobre (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ieheich.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.