The Week‘s Brad DeLong provided an interesting history lesson on the first use of interventionist government policy in the interests of national financial stability.
The Panic of 1825
Writing in December 1825 to her friend Hannah More, [Marianne Thornton] said: “There is just now a great pressure in the mercantile world, in the consequence of the breaking of so many of these scheming stock company bubbles.”
Sound familiar? These were not bubbles in high-tech stocks or in mortgage lending and house prices, however, but bubbles in shipping lines, canals, and textile-spinning factories.