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.

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.

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.