Financial episodes can have effects beyond their own direct impact through the memories that they evoke for generations of market participants and regulators. This chapter traces how the memory of the 1974 Herstatt Bank collapse evolved in the 30 years following, as banking and financial markets globalized and the cross-border payments system was transformed from paper to complex ICT solutions. Along the way, we consider less well studied episodes of financial system distress and demonstrate how these events were remembered by policy-makers through their own words. We then consider why it took so long to reduce Herstatt Risk despite its strong memory among bankers and policy-makers. The inability of private-sector initiatives on their own to overcome technical, operational, and jurisdictional challenges meant that banks struggled to come up with robust feasible solutions. Meanwhile coordination problems among central bankers made it difficult for them to grapple with the systemic structure of settlement risk.
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- Introduces memory studies tools into the field of economic and financial history
- Improves our understanding of financial crises by fostering historical contributions to the post-2008 debate
- Goes beyond the often-used Great Recession-Great Depression analogy of financial crisis
- Reflects on the consequences of the absence of experience and memory of system financial crises
The history of financial crises can be approached from several perspectives. This book considers the role played by memory, and its relationships with history, when it comes to financial crises. The book is not primarily interested in the lesson drawing process activated by the remembrance of past crises (even though there is also space for this element). It is interested, instead, in whether or not, and how, the memory of previous crises has persisted, faded, or changed over time. Intertwining memory and narrative representations of the reality, the volume investigates the reasons why some crises have been (selectively) remembered and others apparently forgotten. The book goes beyond the analogy Great Depression–Global Financial Crisis that has been suggested and analysed since 2007. Comparisons with the financial crises of the Great Depression are not avoided, and can be found in most chapters of the book, but the case studies gathered here are devoted to other important crises that have invested the international system since the early 1970s and the return to financial instability, in particular the shocks of the 1970s, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, the Stock Market Crash of 1987, the financial turbulences of the 1990s, including the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In addition, some chapters take a long-term perspective, going back to the 1930s or even the late nineteenth century, while others discuss thematic issues (regulation, bankers’ collective biography, economics education) related to financial crises.
1:Introduction: History and memory of financial crises, Youssef Cassis and Giuseppe Telesca
2:Forgotten and remembered nightmares Herstatt Risk in the global payments system, Catherine R. Schenk
3:Narratives and memories of the International Debt Crisis from an Anglo-American and Mexican perspective, Bruno Pacchiotti and Giuseppe Telesca
4:Episodic amnesia and selective memory, a literature overview of the 1982 crisis on the eve of its fortieth anniversary, Carlo Edoardo Altamura and Juan Flores Zendejas
5:The spectre of history: How the fear of depression haunts financial crises, Johanna Gautier-Morin
6:From a developmental to a market-oriented economy: Memory and the politics of the 'IMF' crisis in South Korea, Seung Woo Kim
7:The end of Bretton Woods and the rise of over-the-counter derivatives: The mostly forgotten regulatory debates, Tobias Pforr
8:Bankers in times of crisis: A prosopographic study of global financial elites, 1982-2008, Niccolò Valmori
9:The problems of economics: Shifting crises in economics education after Bretton Woods, Alice Pearson
10:Banking under the influence of history?: Remembering and forgetting at Danske Bank, Per H. Hansen
11:The Global Financial Crisis of 2008: Memory, history, legacy, Youssef Cassis
Oxford University Press
Published: Hardcover 05 May 2026 (Estimated) | eBook 01 Apr 2026
English
256 Pages
ISBN: 9780198950127
eISBN: 9780198950158
