By looking at a wide range of industrialized economies, including England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Argentina, the United States, and "late developers" such as Russia, this book aims to show how important the state was in the development of financial systems. It examines the various factors that contributed to the emergence of diverse financial systems, and through comparative historical analysis draws together general themes, such as the inter-country differences in the mix of public and private finance, to produce a book that makes an unique contribution to financial and economic history.

With a new look at the 1880s financial reforms in Japan, Steven J. Ericson's Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan overturns widely held views of the program carried out by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. As Ericson shows, rather than constituting an orthodox financial-stabilization program—a sort of precursor of the "neoliberal" reforms promoted by the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s—Matsukata's policies differed in significant ways from both classical economic liberalism and neoliberal orthodoxy. The Matsukata financial reform has become famous largely for the wrong reasons, and Ericson sets the record straight. He shows that Matsukata intended to pursue fiscal retrenchment and budget-balancing when he became finance minister in late 1881. Various exigencies, including foreign military crises and a worsening domestic depression, compelled him instead to increase spending by running deficits and floating public bonds. Though he drastically reduced the money supply, he combined the positive and contractionary policies of his immediate predecessors to pull off a program of "expansionary austerity" paralleling state responses to financial crisis elsewhere in the world both then and now. Through a new and much-needed recalibration of this pivotal financial reform, Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan demonstrates that, in several ways, ranging from state-led export promotion to the creation of a government-controlled central bank, Matsukata advanced policies that were more in line with a nationalist, developmentalist approach than with a liberal economic one. Ericson shows that Matsukata Masayoshi was far from a rigid adherent of classical economic liberalism.

Financial systems around the world are undergoing a process of modernization due to many different forces. Advances in information technology, product and market innovations, and recent regional financial crises have contributed to this movement. As a result, evolution in the financial sector is leading to larger, more complex financial organizations that render inadequate the supervisory and regulatory structures currently in place. While some changes in regulatory policies have already occurred, the adaptation of supervisory oversight and regulation in the face of these new developments is expected to continue for many years to come. This book collects papers originally presented in September 1998 at the Financial Modernization and Regulation Conference co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and San Francisco. Revised before publication, the papers seek to identify the reasons for changes in the financial services sector, and the implications these changes pose for financial supervision and regulation. Taken together, the papers offer valuable insights on 1) the forces behind financial modernization; 2) the implications financial modernization poses for corporate structure, market discipline, and financial regulation; 3) how to price deposit insurance accurately to reflect banks' risk-taking; and 4) balancing private versus public interests and managing potentially conflicting public policy goals.