The winding up of the Ayr Bank, 1772-1816

Paul Kosmetatos ()
Additional contact information
Paul Kosmetatos: Centre for Financial History, http://www.centreforfinancialhistory.org/people/

No 19, Working Papers from Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge

Abstract: The collapse of the experimental Ayr Bank was the central episode of the 1772-3 credit crisis, and is used as a prominent example in Adam Smith's monetary analysis in the Wealth of Nations. Subsequent literature on the affair has been overly influenced by a small number of printed sources, and has propagated their biases. This article uses previously unpublished manuscript evidence to reconstruct and extend the existing narrative of this famous episode, and identifies the issuance of redeemable annuities in response to the bank's stop of payments in June 1772 as the main cause for the size of its losses.

Pages: 10,432 words (not including abstract) plus 8 tables
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Cambridge Working Paper in Economic & Social History, No. 19

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/CWPESHnumber19April2014.pdf None. (application/pdf)
None.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cmh:wpaper:19

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Guillaume Proffit () and Alexis Litvine ().