Financial Crises: Essential Resources

This week's wild events have left me fielding many questions.  I rely heavily on the following resources:

Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Crashes and Panics:  A History of Financial Crises, 1978.  I taught from Kindleberger's International Economics, the standard textbook at the time (1970s when I was teaching).  After his retirement, he collected and synthesized a wealth of information about financial crises in what has become the standard work on the subject.

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds
, 1841.  Covers the
Mississippi Company, Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble as well as other
delusions.  Key takeaway: don't trust people to be rational.

Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the
Money Market
, 1873.

  Bagehot (pronounced “badge-it”) was a businessman who became
a journalist, eventually editor of The Economist.  When he wrote Lombard Street,
educated men understood banks but not the banking system.  This books explains well the value of a
lender of last resort in a financial crisis.