Walter Bagehot – Lombard Street

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Walter Bagehot – Lombard Street

In 1873, Walter Bagehot published what remains one of the most perceptive and farsighted books on modern finance. The most famous thing in the book is probably Bagehot’s advice to the lender of last resort: in a crisis lend quickly and freely against good collateral at a penalty rate. There are many more gems. In an action-packed introductory chapter, Bagehot covers how financial innovation was key to the industrial revolution, the essence of leverage, and why financial firms have a tendency to foolishly blow themselves up. He ends with a plug for the CFE (well, for the mission of the CFE anyway).

Some highlights from Chapter 1:

A place like Lombard Street, where in all but the rarest times money can be always obtained upon good security or upon decent prospects of probable gain, is a luxury which no country has ever enjoyed.…

A citizen of London in Queen Elizabeth’s time could not have imagined our state of mind. He would have thought that it was of no use inventing railways (if he could have understood what a railway meant), for you would not have been able to collect the capital with which to make them.…

The briefest and truest way of describing Lombard Street is to say that it is by far the greatest combination of economical power and economical delicacy that the world has even seen. …

Again, it may be said that we need not be alarmed at the magnitude of our credit system or at its refinement, for that we have learned by experience the way of controlling it, and always manage it with discretion. But we do not always manage it with discretion. There is the astounding instance of Overend, Gurney, and Co. to the contrary. Ten years ago that house stood next to the Bank of England in the City of London; it was better known abroad than any similar firm–known, perhaps, better than any purely English firm.…

Yet in six years they lost all their own wealth, sold the business to the company, and then lost a large part of the company’s capital. And these losses were made in a manner so reckless and so foolish, that one would think a child who had lent money in the City of London would have lent it better.…

After this example, we must not confide too surely in long-established credit, or in firmly-rooted traditions of business. We must examine the system on which these great masses of money are manipulated, and assure ourselves that it is safe and right. …

I believe that our system, though curious and peculiar, may be worked safely; but if we wish so to work it, we must study it.…

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