List of banking crises

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Number of countries having a banking crisis in each year since 1800. This is based on This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which covers only 70 countries. The general upward trend might be attributed to many factors. One of these is a gradual historical increase in the percent of people who receive money for their labor. Another, elsewhere suggested reason related to more recent development trends and to banking crisis during modern era might be changes in the size of banking sector compared to overall GDP. The dramatic feature of this graph is the virtual absence of banking crises during the period of the Bretton Woods agreement, 1945 to 1971. This analysis is similar to Figure 10.1 in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). For more details see the help file for "bankingCrises" in the Ecdat package available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). BankingCrises.svg
Number of countries having a banking crisis in each year since 1800. This is based on This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which covers only 70 countries. The general upward trend might be attributed to many factors. One of these is a gradual historical increase in the percent of people who receive money for their labor. Another, elsewhere suggested reason related to more recent development trends and to banking crisis during modern era might be changes in the size of banking sector compared to overall GDP. The dramatic feature of this graph is the virtual absence of banking crises during the period of the Bretton Woods agreement, 1945 to 1971. This analysis is similar to Figure 10.1 in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). For more details see the help file for "bankingCrises" in the Ecdat package available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

This is a list of banking crises. A banking crisis is a financial crisis that affects banking activity. Banking crises include bank runs, which affect single banks; banking panics, which affect many banks; and systemic banking crises, in which a country experiences many defaults and financial institutions and corporations face great difficulties repaying contracts. [1] A banking crisis is marked by bank runs that lead to the demise of financial institutions, or by the demise of a financial institution that starts a string of similar demises. [2]

Contents

Bank runs

A bank run occurs when many bank customers withdraw their deposits because they believe the bank might fail. There have been many runs on individual banks throughout history; for example, some of the 2008–2009 bank failures in the United States were associated with bank runs.

Banking panics and systemic banking crises

18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Panic of 1837</span> 19th-century United States financial crisis

The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that began a major depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages dropped, westward expansion was stalled, unemployment rose, and pessimism abounded.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bank run</span> Mass withdrawal of money from banks

A bank run or run on the bank occurs when many clients withdraw their money from a bank, because they believe the bank may fail in the near future. In other words, it is when, in a fractional-reserve banking system, numerous customers withdraw cash from deposit accounts with a financial institution at the same time because they believe that the financial institution is, or might become, insolvent. When they transfer funds to another institution, it may be characterized as a capital flight. As a bank run progresses, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: as more people withdraw cash, the likelihood of default increases, triggering further withdrawals. This can destabilize the bank to the point where it runs out of cash and thus faces sudden bankruptcy. To combat a bank run, a bank may acquire more cash from other banks or from the central bank, or limit the amount of cash customers may withdraw, either by imposing a hard limit or by scheduling quick deliveries of cash, encouraging high-return term deposits to reduce on-demand withdrawals or suspending withdrawals altogether.

A currency crisis is a type of financial crisis, and is often associated with a real economic crisis. A currency crisis raises the probability of a banking crisis or a default crisis. During a currency crisis the value of foreign denominated debt will rise drastically relative to the declining value of the home currency. Generally doubt exists as to whether a country's central bank has sufficient foreign exchange reserves to maintain the country's fixed exchange rate, if it has any.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Panic of 1884</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bank failure</span> Insolvency or illiquidity of a bank

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Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.

The Panic of 1930 was a financial crisis that occurred in the United States which led to a severe decline in the money supply during a period of declining economic activity. A series of bank failures from agricultural areas during this time period sparked panic among depositors which led to widespread bank runs across the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2007–2008 financial crisis</span> Worldwide economic crisis

The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. Predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, a continuous buildup of toxic assets within banks, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble culminated in a "perfect storm", which led to the Great Recession.

In economics, twin crises, also called a balance of payments crisis, are simultaneous crises in banking and currency. The term was introduced in the late 1990s by economists Graciela Kaminsky and Carmen Reinhart after several such crises worldwide.

References

Reinhart, Carmen M.; Rogoff, Kenneth S. (2009). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly . Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0-691-14216-6.

Taylor, Alan M. The great leveraging. NBER 18290

Notes

  1. Laeven L, Valencia F (2008). "Systemic banking crises: a new database" (PDF). IMF WP/08/224. International Monetary Fund. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
  2. Reinhart C, Rogoff K (2009). "Varieties of crises and their dates" (PDF). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton University Press. pp. 3–20. ISBN   978-0-691-14216-6 . Retrieved 2009-11-28.