This article analyses a set of financial advisory missions led primarily by Robert Triffin of the US Federal Reserve Board to Latin American countries during the 1940s. These missions developed a new approach to international ‘money doctoring’ that rejected both the content and style of the better-known US financial advisory missions led by Edwin Kemmerer during the 1920s. The missions were driven by a number of motivations that emerged from the politics of the New Deal and the Good Neighbour policy. The episode highlights the diversity of international money doctoring experiences, the importance of the financial dimensions of the Good Neighbour policy, and the wider geographical impact of a new kind of financial internationalism that emerged in US foreign policy in the wake of the 1930s.

In the nineteenth century, British banking had a complete spectrum of shareholder liability regimes, ranging from pure limited to unlimited liability. Although the debate surrounding the US experience with double liability in banking is well documented, we know relatively little about the British experience of and debate about shareholder liability regimes in banking. Consequently, this article traces the development of views on shareholder liability regimes in nineteenth-century British banking. One of the main findings is that the chief argument for limited liability in British banking was based upon the perceived weaknesses of unlimited liability. In addition, it appears that much of the debate concentrated on the depositor-assuring viability of alternatives to unlimited liability.

Numerous handloom weavers' cottages in Lancashire were constructed by terminating building societies. Given their numbers, it is evident that the role of such societies in the regional socio-economic context has been understated. Identifying their membership reveals that these were not self-help schemes to enable artisans to own their own homes, but rather that they offered opportunities for those with surplus income to invest in tenanted properties at a time when the skills of the handloom weaver were at a premium. This provision was vital to Lancashire's burgeoning economy, and offered subscribers an additional source of income.

Hong Kong SAR is well known as one of the few economies to operate a form of currency board as the basis of its monetary system. This system arose out of colonial status and has been retained except for a period of floating from 1975-83 to the present day, with some amendments. This article explores the evolution of the Exchange Fund during a period of global exchange rate instability showing that the abandonment of the monetary anchor in 1975 was part of a series of innovations to the use of the Fund as the colonial government sought to manage the exchange rate risks posed by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

The development of a well-adapted financial system was a main part of the successful Swedish economic modernisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this article it is shown that this development followed the pattern of a financial revolution. Major institutional and organisational changes that took place roughly between the late 1850s and early 1870s led to a rapid increase in liquidity and financial services. This financial revolution preceded the acceleration in economic growth in general and in the modern, industrial sector in particular. Monetisation especially encouraged growth, both in the industrial sector and in GDP as a whole. The basis of the financial system, measured as commercial bank assets and equity capital, affected overall GDP growth. The results also clearly promoted the importance of the development of the financial sector and monetisation as an interlinked and complementary process.

This article explores the development of the closed-end investment trust in both the UK and the US, in the context of the investment management strategies adopted and whether they provided value-added services for investors. Although US investment trusts of the 1920s boom years were heavily influenced by their earlier UK counterparts, they differed from British investment trusts in a number of key ways, in particular, size, capital structure, tax and accounting practices, management, and costs. These differences led to their relatively much worse performance in the stock market crash of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This poor US trust performance led directly to the creation of the US open-ended ‘fixed trust’, marketed as an antidote to the generally poor management of conventional closed-end investment trusts. As confidence in mutual funds slowly returned in the United States, open-ended funds were gradually given more flexibility, but US investment trust companies, with share prices at a steep discount to liquidation value, and partly blamed for the crash, were encouraged to convert to mutual fund status by the 1936 Revenue Act. By 1944, open-end funds had overtaken investment trusts in terms of asset size, a phenomenon that did not occur in Britain for another 30 years.

This article challenges the conventional view of the existence of a pure floating regime in France during the mid 1920s. Our study, based on the archives of the Bank of France and the French Ministry of Finance, as well as a thorough examination of the exchange rates (FRF/USD) and (FRF/GBP) during the 1920s, reveals that the French authorities did intervene on several occasions. From these first direct actions, as well as some other abortive attempts, several lessons can be drawn about the effectiveness of interventions on a ‘modern’ exchange rate market.

Trade credit - the credit provided by suppliers to firms - can be seen as the second-best solution when financial development fails to keep pace with economic growth. This article analyses trade credit between Catalan cotton manufacturers and their clients in nineteenth-century Spain. Spanish historiography has suggested that trade credit had a detrimental effect on the profitability of the cotton firms. Based on an analysis of the archives of several firms, as well as judicial and notary sources, we present a more optimistic interpretation of the system. Manufacturers were, in fact, acting as their customers' bankers because they were in the best position to perform this function. They built up a good information structure, managed the credit risk efficiently and got positive returns from this activity.