Nemesis

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-120
Author(s):  
Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Banking Crises ◽  
Financial Contagion ◽  
Securities Markets ◽  
Financial Systems ◽  
Financial Conglomerates ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
Universal Bank ◽  
The U.S

Banking crises occurred on both sides of the Atlantic during the Great Depression. Troubled universal banks were at the center of each crisis. The first U.S. banking crisis in late 1930 was caused by the failures of two large financial conglomerates. In May 1931, the collapse of Austria’s biggest universal bank triggered a series of crises that swept through Europe. Austria, Germany, Belgium, and Italy took extraordinary measures to rescue their largest universal banks. In the U.S., the Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided loans that prevented the failures of two large universal banks in 1932. However, the RFC allowed the two biggest banks in Detroit to fail in February 1933, thereby precipitating a nationwide banking panic. In contrast, Great Britain and Canada did not experience systemic banking crises despite serious economic downturns. The separation between commercial banks and securities markets in those two nations prevented financial contagion that could have undermined their entire financial systems.

‘WE DID MORE THAN THE U.S. AND GREAT BRITAIN.’

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (046) ◽  
pp. 20-20
Author(s):  
Yekaterina Postnikova
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
The U.S

Counterterrorism Between the Wars

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary S. Barton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Second World ◽  
The U.S

This is a book about terrorism, weapons, and diplomacy in the interwar years between the First and Second World Wars. It charts the convergence of the manufacture and trade of arms; diplomacy among the Great Powers and the domestic politics within them; the rise of national liberation and independence movements; and the burgeoning concept and early institutions of international counterterrorism. Key themes include: a transformation in meaning and practice of terrorism; the inability of Great Powers—namely, Great Britain, the United States, France—to harmonize perceptions of interest and the pursuit of common interests; the establishment of the tools and infrastructure of modern intelligence—including the U.S.-U.K. cooperation that would evolve into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance; and the nature of peacetime in the absence of major wars. Particular emphasis is given to British attempts to quell revolutionary nationalist movements in India and elsewhere in its empire, and to the Great Powers’ combined efforts to counter the activities of the Communist International. The facilitating roles of the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations are explored here, in the context of the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919, the Arms Traffic Conference of 1925, and the 1937 Terrorism Convention.

scholarly journals The Logic and Legitimacy of Bank Supervision: The Case of the Bank Holiday of 1933

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Peter Conti-Brown ◽  
Sean H. Vanatta
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Banking Crises ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Bank Supervision ◽  
Political Skills ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. banking holiday of March 1933 was a pivotal event in twentieth-century political and economic history. After closing the nation's banks for nine days, the administration of newly inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt restarted the banking system as the first step toward national recovery from the global Great Depression. In the conventional narrative, the holiday succeeded because Roosevelt used his political talents to restore public confidence in the nation's banks. However, such accounts say virtually nothing about what happened during the holiday itself. We reinterpret the banking crises of the 1930s and the 1933 holiday through the lens of bank supervision, the continuous oversight of commercial banks by government officials. Through the 1930s banking crises, federal supervisors identified troubled banks but could not act to close them. Roosevelt empowered supervisors to act decisively during the holiday. By closing some banks, supervisors made credible Roosevelt's claims that banks that reopened were sound. Thus, the union of FDR's political skills with the technical judgment of bank supervisors was the key to solving the banking crisis. Neither could stand alone, and both together were the vital precondition for further economic reforms—including devaluing the dollar—and, with them, Roosevelt's New Deal.

Locating Nowhere

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Michael Robertson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Edward Bellamy ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Fourier ◽  
Total Reconstruction

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.

U.S. Farm and Food Subsidies

Food Fights ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 162-186
Author(s):  
Sarah Ludington
Keyword(s):  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
School Lunches ◽  
Department Of Agriculture ◽  
Farm Bill ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Agriculture ◽  
Farm Subsidies ◽  
The U.S

From its founding, the U.S. government has promoted agriculture, and since the Great Depression, has directly supported farm incomes and crop prices. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs linked farm subsidies to food assistance for the poor, a politically successful combination then and now. Sarah Ludington describes how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), through the Farm Bill, became responsible for school lunches, food stamps, and land conservation in addition to billions of dollars in subsidies for commodity crops like corn and cotton. Now a target for both the right wing and left wing of American politics, the Farm Bill continues to embody the tensions at the heart of American agriculture.

New Deals

2017 ◽  
pp. 62-87
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Severs
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Great Society ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The U.S

This chapter demonstrates the deep importance of Wallace’s collegiate study of U.S. economic policy, especially in the Great Depression, to his early short stories. What if, I ask, we locate Wallace’s “origins” not in the post-World War II moment or 1960s ironic postmodernism, but instead in the crash of 1929, a less predictable moment of cultural crisis in which he took a quieter but subsuming interest? Key elements that emerge in this chapter are the U.S. Treasury (surreally portrayed as the issuer of a post-gold-standard currency – and post-metaphysical meaning – in the uncollected gem “Crash of 69”) and, in “Westward,” the governmental remedies of social insurance and economic reconstruction in the New Deal. While attending more briefly to other stories in Girl With Curious Hair, this chapter also provides sustained readings of Dust-Bowl metaphysics in “John Billy” and Johnson’s Great Society in “Lyndon.”

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