A nationwide panic forced President Roosevelt to declare a banking holiday in March 1933. The government reopened banks sequentially using a process that sent noisy signals about banks’ health. New microdata reveals that the public responded to these signals. Deposits at rapidly reopened banks rebounded quicker than at comparable or stronger banks that reopened even a few days later. The stigma of late reopening shifted funds from stigmatized to lauded banks and among communities that they served. Despite persisting over a decade, the shift had no measurable impact on the rate at which localities recovered from the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve Act divided Mississippi between the 6th (Atlanta) and 8th (St. Louis) Districts. During the Great Depression, these districts’ policies differed. Atlanta championed monetary activism and the extension of aid to ailing banks. St. Louis eschewed expansionary initiatives. During a banking crisis in 1930, Atlanta expedited lending to banks in need. St. Louis did not. Outcomes differed across districts. In Atlanta, banks survived at higher rates, lending continued at higher levels, commerce contracted less, and recovery began earlier. These patterns indicate that central bank intervention influenced bank health, credit availability, and business activity.

The collapse of long-term lending relationships amplified the Great Depression. We demonstrate this by developing a new measure of lending relationships that can be calculated from widely available data at any level of aggregation. Our approach exploits differences in the responsiveness of loan rates to bank funding costs and is supported by historical evidence and theoretical arguments. The new measure reveals that the marginal impact of bank suspensions on economic activity was higher in more relationship-intensive areas, providing the first formal evidence that relationship lending propagated the real effects of banking sector distress in the early 1930s.

This essay assesses whether network linkages within the banking system amplified the real effects of bank failures during the Great Contraction. In 1929, nearly all interbank deposits held by Federal Reserve member banks belonged to “shadowy” nonmember banks which were outside the regulatory reach of federal regulators. Regional banking panics in the early 1930s drained these interbank deposits from central reserve city banks. Money-center banks in Chicago and New York responded to volatile and declining interbank deposits by changing their asset composition. They reduced their lending to businesses and individuals, and increased their holdings of cash and government bonds.

Interbank networks amplified the contraction in lending during the Great Depression. Panics induced banks in the hinterland to withdraw interbank deposits from Federal Reserve member banks located in reserve and central reserve cities. These correspondent banks responded by curtailing lending to businesses. Between the peak in the summer of 1929 and the banking holiday in the winter of 1933, interbank amplification reduced aggregate commercial bank lending by an estimated 15 percent.

Regulatory independence forms a foundation for modern financial systems. The institutions’ value is illuminated by a Progressive Era policy experiment when independent state-bank regulators came under governors’ supervision. Afterwards, bank resolution rates declined during gubernatorial election campaigns for banks supervised by state but not national authorities. This gubernatorial-campaign effect diminished by two orders of magnitude, but did not disappear, after the FDIC became the independent resolver for all insured banks in 1935. In addition, during the Progressive Era, declines in bank resolutions led to declines in business bankruptcy rates, an effect that is not observed in the FDIC era. Our findings indicate regulatory independence can dramatically reduce but may not eliminate politics’ impact on banks and the economy.

Ongoing financial innovation raises the specter of banking and payment crises. Little aggregate evidence exists on the repercussions of substantial suspensions of payments. State-level experiments fill this gap. Four times in the last forty years, U.S. governors suspended payments from state-insured depositories. Rhode Island’s deposits crisis (1991), which was large, prolonged, and occurred during a recession, substantially lengthened and deepened the downturn. Deposits freezes in Nebraska (1983), Ohio (1985), and Maryland (1985), which were short and occurred during expansions, had little macroeconomic impact. Data sparsity inhibits analysis of these events with standard methods. To perform inference, we develop a novel Bayesian method for synthetic control, which generates output useful for policymakers and theorists. Our findings suggest policies that ensure institutions continue to process payments on a business-as-usual basis at all times have substantial value.

In the boom before the Great Depression, capital requirements for commercial banks were low and fixed. Bankers faced double liability. Failing banks were not bailed out. During the boom before the Great Recession, capital requirements were proportional to risk-weighted assets. Bankers faced limited liability. Banks deemed too big to fail received bailouts. During the 1920s, the largest banks increased capital levels as asset prices rose. During the boom from 2002 to 2007, the largest institutions kept capital levels near regulatory minimums. Our results suggest more market discipline would have induced the largest U.S. banks to hold greater capital buffers prior to the financial crisis of 2008.

Scholars differ on whether central bank intervention mitigates banking panics. In April 1929, a fruit fly infestation in Florida forced the U.S. government to quarantine fruit shipments from the state and destroy infested groves. In July, depositors panicked in Tampa and surrounding cities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta rushed currency to member banks beset by runs. We show that this intervention arrested the panic and estimate that bank failures would have been twice as high without the Federal Reserve’s intervention. Our results suggest that similar interventions may have reduced bank failures during the Great Depression.