Of the many steps taken to combat the depression during the Roosevelt administration's famous first hundred days, none was more significant than the passage of the June 16, 1933 Banking Act providing for the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). No step was more significant,…
(This is the last installment of a three-part essay. The other parts are here and here.) A Capital Bank As its title suggests, the best-known history of the RFC, James Stuart Olson's (1982) Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933 -1940, is nothing…
What finally brought the Great Depression to an end? We've seen that, whatever it was, it took place not during the 30s but sometime between then and the end of World War II, when a remarkable postwar revival occurred instead of the renewed depression many feared. We've…
My last post argued that, despite what Diamond and Dybvig's famous theory suggests, bank runs have seldom proven fatal to otherwise sound banks. Instead, when people run on a bank, it's usually because it's already in hot water. In response to that post, a Twitter correspondent wondered…
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics is to be shared by Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig, “for research on banks and financial crises.” Diamond and Dybvig are best known for their 1983 article, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity,” in which they…