In the Eye of a Storm: Manhattan's Money Center Banks During the International Financial Crisis of 1931

Gary Richardson and Patrick Van Horn ()

No 17437, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In the summer of 1931, a financial crisis began in Austria, spread to Germany, forced Britain to abandon the gold standard, crossed the Atlantic, and afflicted financial institutions in the United States. This article describes how banks in New York City, the central money market of the United States, reacted to this trans-Atlantic trauma. New York’s money-center banks anticipated the onset of a financial crisis, prepared for it by accumulating substantial reserves, and during the European crisis, continued business as usual. New York’s leading bankers deliberately and collectively decided on the business-as-usual policy in order to minimize the impact of the panic in the United States. New York banks’ behavior changed only after the Federal Reserve raised discount rates to stem gold outflows in the fall of 1931.

JEL-codes: E02 E42 E44 G21 N1 N12 N14 N2 N22 N24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-ifn, nep-mac and nep-mon
Note: DAE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Gary Richardson & Patrick Van Horn, 2017. "In the Eye of a Storm: Manhattan's Money Center Banks during the International Financial Crisis of 1931," Explorations in Economic History, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17437.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: In the eye of a Storm: Manhattan's money center banks during the international financial crisis of 1931 (2018)
Working Paper: In the Eye of a Storm: Manhattan's Money Center Banks during the International Financial Crisis of 1931 (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:17437

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17437

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().