Word: banking
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...When rumors that the new Roosevelt Administration would devalue the dollar led to widespread flight from dollars into gold, the Fed raised the discount rate, setting the scene for the nationwide bank holiday proclaimed by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 6, 1933, two days after his Inauguration - a "holiday" from which 2,500 banks never returned...
...Friedman and Schwartz saw it, the Fed could have mitigated the crisis by cutting rates, making loans and buying bonds (so-called open-market operations). Instead, it made a bad situation worse by reducing its credit to the banking system. This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and making balance sheets look even worse. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial-bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion - 9% of the total. By January 1932, 1,860 banks had failed...
...Only in April 1932, amid heavy political pressure, did the Fed attempt large-scale open-market purchases - its first serious effort to counter the liquidity crisis. Even this did not suffice to avert a final wave of bank failures in late 1932, which precipitated the first state "bank holidays" (temporary statewide closures of all banks...
...Still Be Avoided At the moment, a reworked bailout deal seems likely to pass. But the world may still be heading for a severe downturn. Interbank lending remains stubbornly frozen, despite the Fed's liquidity fire hose. With WaMu and Wachovia wiped out, the stampede out of bank stocks and bonds will surely claim new victims. As the recession bites, Main Street firms will start going bust too. And the impact on the $62 trillion market for credit-default swaps could be explosive...
...Sept. 29 alone, governments from Germany to Iceland rushed to prop up five ailing financial institutions with huge cash infusions or full-blown nationalization, making it one of the grimmest days in the history of European finance. Among the high-profile casualties were Fortis, Belgium's largest bank; the venerable British mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley; and Germany's Hypo Real Estate, which has a massive $560 billion balance sheet and is a big player in the domestic securities market. As the governments stepped in, the message they sent to the public was supposed to be reassuring: Don't panic - your...