Financial crises prior to the typewriter

The Bank of England’s Bank Underground blog has a “Christmas Special” on financial crises in the UK in 1847, 1857 and 1866. The first commercially successful typewriter was invented only in 1868 and so all the letters from the Chancellor to the Governor of the Bank of England were handwritten. I was familiar with these letters from reading Andreades’ excellent History of the Bank of England, and several other sources, but unlike the Bank Underground blog posts, none of these sources contain any facsimile of the actual letters. What struck me was that these letters were written in rather poor handwriting. The blog posts take the pain of transcribing these letters, and without this, I would not have been able to decipher some of these words. This is all the more surprising since Andreades does state (at least in once case, page 336) that the official letter was sent two days after the Bank of England was unofficially informed about the decision.

Bank Underground also links to a newspaper article written by Karl Marx about the 1857 suspension of the Bank Act. I find it hard to disagree with the following observation of Marx about the report of the Select Committee of Parliament on the operation of the Bank Act:

The Committee, it would appear, had to decide on a very simple alternative. Either the periodical violation of the law by the Government was right, and then the law must be wrong, or the law was right, and then the Government ought to be interdicted from arbitrarily tampering with it. But will it be believed that the Committee has contrived to simultaneously vindicate the perpetuity of the law and the periodical recurrence of its infraction? Laws have usually been designed to circumscribe the discretionary power of Government. Here, on the contrary, the law seems only continued in order to continue to the Executive the discretionary power of overruling it.

More than a century and a half later, nowhere in the world have we been able to solve this dilemma of the excessive discretionary power of the government in times of crisis.

Posted at 5:55 pm IST on Tue, 27 Dec 2016         permanent link

Categories: crisis, financial history

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