Dana Brahm
Last Name
Brahm
First name
Dana
Email
dana.brahm@unisg.ch
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Item type:Publication, The 1866 Crisis and The Role of Economic and Financial Experts: A Study in The Development of Monetary and Banking Policy Advising in Times of Financial Crisis(2024-04-26)The failure of the London bank Overend, Gurney & Co. in 1866 triggered a domestic and international financial crisis. The then private Bank of England chose not to bail out Overend but mitigated the ensuing panic. The management of the bank’s collapse and its aftermath challenged the monetary and banking landscape, giving rise to public and expert debates on policies and regulations about the lender of last resort policy and the monetary policy clash between the Banking School and Currency School. This project’s aim is threefold: (1) to provide a historical perspective on the organisation and use of economic experts in the ruling of monetary policy and financial regulation; (2) to study the impact of financial crises in such processes; (3) to examine the roles of the British State and the Bank of England regarding economic policy advising and decision-making processes. To this end, published and archival primary source material related to the crisis (e.g. minutes, reports, correspondence, publications) and selected actors (i.e. the Bank of England, Treasury, economic policy advisors) is analysed and discussed in the context of the topic’s historiography. The findings reveal that due to the controversy, urgency, and uncertainty of this crisis, the specialised knowledge of institutional authorities was questioned. This accelerated the public and institutional legitimation of external economic experts as direct and indirect sources of policy advising. It also drove the Bank of England and the State to reconsider the use and value of commissioned and external expert advising on monetary and banking policies.Type:conference contribution - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Economic Policy Advice and the Press: The Case of Late 19th-Century Britain(2023-09)The 2007 financial crisis brought forward the powerful position of economists as experts, and the role of public opinion and media in the debates surrounding economic policy advice. The rise and organization of economic expertise has been largely studied from the 1900s on, but its perception and legitimacy has been rationalized and problematized by the public, via popular media, before the modern institutionalization of technocratic financial and monetary advice (Flandreau, 2003; Fourcade, 2009). In this presentation, I explore the history of the role of newspapers in the dissemination, legitimization, and organization of economic policy advice in the late Victorian British era (1870-1900). This period is particularly interesting for three main reasons: (1) the rise of the modern state and its growing reliance on scientific knowledge, (2) the academic institutionalization of the economic discipline, (3) and the development of new institutions designed to collect, curate, and assess information, such as mass press. Indeed, by the late 19th century, British newspapers went from being a source of information to the political and social elite to constituting the main reading of the wider public. I use digital archives of regional and local Victorian British newspapers (e.g. The Economist, The Times, The Telegraph, The Scotsman) to qualitatively study the discourses related to economic policy advice and figures of economic expertise. Based on primary material and literature on scientific knowledge production and media studies (Jasanoff, 1990; Daston and Galison, 2007; Conboy, 2002), I argue that, in this context, Victorian newspapers had a dual role: they reported but also created political discourses on expert economic advice. As such, I show that they played a key role in the articulation of the growing force of public opinion in relation to economic expertise at a time when the practice of economic policy advice started to become institutionalized.Type:conference lecture - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, What makes an economic expert? Money doctors in the late Victorian era, 1870-1900(2023-04)Type:conference poster