Banking103 · Module I · Lesson 03 of 9
Reading · 25 min

Reading: Bagehot, Lombard Street (excerpts)

Nineteenth-century clarity on lender of last resort.

Reading

Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873), Chapters 1–2 and 7.

The founding statement of the lender-of-last-resort doctrine. Every twenty-first-century banking crisis has been analyzed through Bagehot's rule — lend freely, at a penalty rate, on good collateral. The Scholar should be able to explain that rule in their own words.

Reading

Primary and secondary sources for this lesson.