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In March 1933, in one of his first acts as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a bank holiday throughout the United States. Considered by many to be a bold step to curb the mounting bank crisis, the decree closed banks in all 48 states and overseas territories, putting money out of reach of citizens, businesses and all levels of government. This narrative history recounts and explains the economic, financial and political backgrounds of the banking panic, arguing that the holiday was not only unnecessary but actually damaging to the economy. The holiday did, however, provide Roosevel

The banking panic of 1930 has special significance for assessing the causal role of money during the Great Depression. A detailed examination of the panic-induced bank closings in November reveals that poor loans and investments in the 1920s was the principal factor contributing to the accelerated rate of bank suspensions. These findings are consistent with the. Friedman-Schwartz interpretation of the 1930 banking panic as a purely autonomous disturbance largely unrelated to the decline in economic activity. It is inconsistent with Peter Temin's conjecture that declining prices of lower-grade corporate bonds and the agricultural situation played an important causal role.

We examine the social costs of asymmetric-information-induced bank panics in an environment without government deposit insurance. Our case study is the Chicago bank panic of June 1932. We compare the ex ante characteristics of panic failures and panic survivors. Despite temporary confusion about bank asset quality on the part of depositors during the panic, which was associated with widespread depositor runs and bank stock price declines, the panic did not produce significant social costs in terms of failures among solvent banks.

"Relying on a broad array of records used together for the first time, Panic in the Loop reveals widespread fraud and insider abuse by bankers--and the complicity of corrupt politicians--that caused the Chicago banking debacle of 1932. It provides a fresh interpretation of the role played by bankers who turned the nation's financial crisis of the early 1930s into the decade-long Great Depression. It also calls for the abolition of secrecy that still permeates the bank regulatory system, which would have prevented the Enron fiasco and the financial meltdown of 2008. This book focuses on the recurrent failures of the financial system--the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Enron debacle of the early 2000s, and finally the financial collapse of 2008. Because of regulatory secrecy, knowing what happened in Chicago in 1932 is critical to understanding the glaring problems in the regulation of American finance, in particular the lack of transparency, the abuse of financial institutions by insiders, and the capture of public institutions by insiders going through the revolving door between the private and public sectors. Eight decades later little has changed. The regulatory failures of the 1930s--especially the pervasive system of secrecy that allowed the fraud and insider abuse to flourish--were repeated during the collapse of 2008. Transparency would strike at the alliance between the executives of financial institutions and public officials, who caused the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression"--Provided by publisher