ABSTRACT
The financial crisis of 1914 was the most geographically extensive, and possibly the most acute, global financial crisis, with some 40 countries affected. Nonetheless, no account exists, and it scarcely features in the two standard comparative works on financial crises; it is absent from Kindleberger’s ‘Stylised Outline of Financial Crises, 1618 to 2008’ and fails to make the grade as one of Reinhart and Rogoff’s seven major ‘episodes of global, multicountry, and regional economic crisis’ spanning 1825-26 to 2008.1 Furthermore, the financial crisis at the start of the war has often been overlooked in the histories of individual countries’ war economies, with the exception of the United States and Britain and, more recently, studies stimulated by the 100th anniversary in 2014.2 Presumably, the neglect stems from its overshadowing by the onset of war and the collapse of the international economy in summer 1914, of which finance was a technical dimension. Moreover, the 1914 crisis was not a ‘proper’ financial crisis in the sense of a turning point in a boom-bust cycle. Nevertheless, the unprecedented global wave of stock market crashes, runs on banks, payment suspensions, currency notes, moratoria and the collapse of the international gold standard, constituted, in The Economist’s phrase, ‘a tremendous panic’.3
