Financial crises in the modern market system: A case of prevention or mitigation?

Financial crisis has been an unfortunate part of financial history. It dates back to at least 33 AD when Emperor Tiberius was forced to pump 100 million sesterces into the Roman financial markets to avoid a financial panic.A later notable crisis was the credit crunch of 1294 when Ricciardi of Lucca – bankers to the English Crown – could not raise money from their fellow merchant societies to fund King Edward I’s armies during war between England and France. Some of the Ricciardi internal letters stated that: “everyone to whom we owed money ran to us and wanted to be paid, and because of this we were held very tight everywhere..., it seems that money has disappeared.” (See R W Kaeuper, “Bankers to the Crown: the Riccardi of Lucca and Edward I” (Princeton, 1973) 228-9.) There have, of course, been many financial crises since then. Examples include: the panics of 1837/39, 1873, 1907, 1914, and 1962; the Great Depression of 1929; the Latin American sovereign debt crisis of 1982; the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the United States (US) throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; the Asian crisis of 1997-1998; the dotcom bubble of 1999-2000; the global financial crisis of 2007-2009; and the subsequent Eurozone sovereign debt crisis of 2011-2014.