The Scottish Banks


Book Description

Banking in Scotland has a long and distinguished history - to this day Scotland is served by its own banks which form a distinct regional group within the wider British banking system. Yet, until this volume, there had been no book which gives a full account of modern Scottish banking, analyzing its position within the British banking structure. With this comprehensive study, this gap in the literature of modern British financial institutions has now been filled. Here, all aspects of Scottish banking are covered. The author describes the structure of the system and the pattern of branch banking, examining the position and practices of Scottish banks in regard to deposits and asset holding. He sets out the modern position of Scottish bank note issues and analyzes their significance both for the banks themselves and for the British system as a whole. The book gives valuable appraisal of the performance of the Scottish banks as lenders to the private business sector. The author is not concerned with Scottish banks simply as institutions domestic to Scotland. He traces their relationship with the City of London and fully analyzes their role within the operations of wider British Monetary policy. This fascinating study, first published in 1965, concludes with a consideration of the future prospects of the Scottish banks within British banking as a whole.




Experience of Free Banking


Book Description

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Banking in Scotland


Book Description

Incorporating HC 38 & HC 319, session 2008-09




The Rise and Fall of the City of Money


Book Description

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance. This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.




The Rationale of Central Banking


Book Description







Legislating Instability


Book Description

From 1716 to 1845, Scotland’s banks were among the most dynamic and resilient in Europe, effectively absorbing a series of adverse economic shocks that rocked financial markets in London and on the continent. Legislating Instability explains the seeming paradox that the Scottish banking system achieved this success without the government controls usually considered necessary for economic stability. Eighteenth-century Scottish banks operated in a regulatory vacuum: no central bank to act as lender of last resort, no monopoly on issuing currency, no legal requirements for maintaining capital reserves, and no formal limits on bank size. These conditions produced a remarkably robust banking system, one that was intensely competitive and served as a prime engine of Scottish economic growth. Despite indicators that might have seemed red flags—large speculative capital flows, a fixed exchange rate, and substantial external debt—Scotland successfully navigated two severe financial crises during the Seven Years’ War. The exception was a severe financial crisis in 1772, seven years after the imposition of the first regulations on Scottish banking—the result of aggressive lobbying by large banks seeking to weed out competition. While these restrictions did not cause the 1772 crisis, Tyler Beck Goodspeed argues, they critically undermined the flexibility and resilience previously exhibited by Scottish finance, thereby elevating the risk that another adverse economic shock, such as occurred in 1772, might threaten financial stability more broadly. Far from revealing the shortcomings of unregulated banking, as Adam Smith claimed, the 1772 crisis exposed the risks of ill-conceived bank regulation.




Banking in Crisis


Book Description

Can the lessons of the past help us to prevent another banking collapse in the future? This is the first book to tell the story of the rise and fall of British banking stability over the past two centuries, shedding new light on why banking systems crash and on the factors underpinning banking stability. John Turner shows that there have only been two major banking crises in Britain during this time - the crises of 1825–6 and 2007–8. Although there were episodic bouts of instability in the interim, the banking system was crisis free. Why was the British banking system stable for such a long time? And, why did the British banking system implode in 2008? In answering these questions, the book explores the long-run evolution of bank regulation, the role of the Bank of England, bank rescues and the need to hold shareholders to account.