This article argues that the British financial system in the era prior to World War I provides modern policymakers with a successful model of how to stabilize the banking system. This model had two components: incentives were structured to ensure that all banks that originated or traded assets on the money market sought only to trade in high-quality assets; and macro-prudential regulation promoted the segregation of money markets from capital markets, monitored the growth of money market credit, and restricted trade on the money market in assets issued by entities and sectors whose money market liabilities were growing so fast that the most reasonable explanation was that the money market was being used to finance longer-term investment. These facts indicate that policymakers can successfully stabilize the banking system through a combination of structural reform and regulation of the growth of credit.

In 1918 the United States Treasury delegated to the War Finance Corporation, a newly created off-budget federal agency, the task of buying Liberty bonds and later Victory notes in an effort to stabilize prices. Bayesian vector autoregression analysis of the security purchases indicates that the WFC purchases provided statistically significant price support, and marginally lowered bond yields while the program operated. Once WFC purchases ended, war bond yields increased substantially. Between bond issues, the Treasury financed its operations, including security purchases from the WFC, by issuing short-term debt, which affected the money market interest rate. The WFC's bond purchases are found to have a positive and significant impact on the call loan rate. Thus the WFC's bond purchases twisted the yield curve.

The British monetary authorities tried to encourage lower long-term interest rates through their government debt management operations between 1962 and 1964, following the Radcliffe report's recommendation that they should have an objective for long-term rates, and with the intention of supporting the government's pursuit of faster economic growth. The implementation of the policy was complicated by the Bank of England's role as a market maker in the government securities market, and beset by misunderstandings among the monetary authorities. The policy was abandoned when the conditions of strong market demand for bonds on which it depended changed. The article describes how the policy was developed and implemented, and the impact of political preferences on it.

Land reform and its financial arrangements are central elements of modern Irish history. Yet to date, the financial mechanisms underpinning Irish land reform have been overlooked. The article outlines the mechanisms of land reform in Ireland and the importance of land bonds to the process. Advances worth over £127 million were made to tenant farmers to purchase their holdings. These schemes enabled the transfer of over three-quarters of land on the island of Ireland. The article introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It illustrates the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. The article finds a high level of state banking in Ireland: large issues of land bonds were held by state-owned savings banks.

This article deals with savings banks and the extent to which they encouraged workers to save. A study of probate inventories from three Swedish towns shows that just 20–30 per cent of workers had assets in savings banks during the second half of the nineteenth century. Saving patterns differed greatly among groups of workers. Savings banks were most important for unskilled, unmarried women, but married workers were more likely to invest in, for example, real estate (1870s) and insurance (1900s). Family considerations greatly affected saving decisions, which detracted from the appeal of savings banks. Their emphasis on individual saving was more suitable for those who needed a flexible alternative to use for different saving needs. This flexibility also made it easier for savings banks to meet growing competition and can explain why they continued to attract workers in the twentieth century. Although savings banks never dominated the workers' saving arena, they probably promoted unmarried workers' awareness of the advantages of saving. Consequently, since all married workers had previously been unmarried, savings banks most likely contributed to fostering saving habits among the working class.