Having spent the last month or so poring over writings on last-resort lending,* and especially writings dealing with the recent crisis and its aftermath, with the particular aim of discovering the best means for supplying last-resort credit when it’s called for, and for not supplying it when it isn’t, I’ve reached a number of tentative conclusions that seem worth reporting. I report them despite their tentative nature so that I might be convinced sooner rather than later that I’m barking up the wrong tree, and also because, if I’m actually on to something, I might get others to help me flesh-out my ideas.
I hasten to add that I regard any need for last-resort lending as reflecting, not the inherent shortcomings of private financial markets, but the debilitating effects of misguided regulatory interference with the free development of those markets. Some of the least regulated banking systems of the past, including systems that lacked central banks, were also famously crisis-free, or close to it.
Modern banking systems are, sadly, a far cry from those ideal arrangements. It’s quite impossible, for that reason, to suppose that we might safely dispense altogether with central bank last-resort lending, without first undertaking other, major reforms. In the meantime, we can strive to reform last-resort lending arrangements, so that they might lower the risk of future crises, instead of making them more likely by contributing to moral hazard, or by otherwise misallocating credit.