I’ve just read Eugene White’s Bank Underground post on the Baring liquidation in 1890. He is notable in getting the facts of what he calls the “rescue” mostly right. He accurately portrays the “good bank-bad bank” structure and the fact that the partners who owned the original bank bore the losses of the failure. What he doesn’t explain clearly is the degree to which the central bank demanded insurance from the private sector banks before agreeing to extend a credit line that would allow the liquidation of the bad bank to take place slowly.
These facts matter, because a good central banker has to make sure that the incentives faced by those in the financial community are properly aligned. In the case of Barings macroeconomic incentives were aligned by making it clear to the private banks that when a SIFI fails, the private banking sector will be forced to bear the losses of that failure. This brings every bank on board to the agenda of making sure the financial system is safely structured.
In the 19th c. the Bank of England understood that few things could be more destabilizing to the financial system than the expectation that the government or the central bank was willing to bear the losses of a SIFI failure. Thus, the Bank of England protected the financial system from the liquidity consequences of a fire sale due to the SIFI, but was very careful not to take on more than a small fraction (less than 6%) of the credit losses that would be created by the SIFI failure.
This is the comment I posted:
While this is one of the better discussions of the 1890 Barings liquidation, for some reason modern economic historians have a lot of difficulty acknowledging the degree to which moral hazard concerns drove central bank conduct in the 19th c. White writes:
The Barings rescue or “lifeboat” was announced on Saturday November 15, 1890. The Bank of England provided an advance of £7.5 million to Barings to discharge their liabilities. A four-year syndicate of banks would ratably share any loss from Barings’ liquidation. The guarantee fund of £17.1 million included all institutions, and some of the largest shares were assigned to banks whose inattentive lending had permitted Barings to swell its portfolio.
Clapham (cited by White), however makes it clear that the way the Bank of England drummed up support for the guarantee fund was by making a very credible threat to let Barings fail. Far from what is implied by the statement “The Bank of England provided an advance of £7.5 million to Barings to discharge their liabilities”, the Bank of England point blank refused to provide such an advance until and unless the guarantee fund was funded by private sector banks to protect the central bank from losses, Clapham p. 332-33.
In short, treating the £7.5 million (which is actually the maximum liability supported by the guarantee fund over a period of four years, Clapham p. 336) as a Bank of England advance may be technically correct because of the legal structure of the guarantee fund (which was managed by the Bank), but gets the economics of the situation dead wrong.
19th century and early 20th century British growth could only take place in an environment where central bankers in London were obsessed with the twin problems of aligning incentives and controlling moral hazard. Historians who pretend that anything else was the case are fostering very dangerous behavior in our current economic climate.
Note: Updated to make the last paragraph specific to Britain.
Synthetic Assets 