History of of Significant Financial Crises of the World & The Lessons Learnt From the Financial Crises of the Past.

From the link: http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/History-of-financial-crisis-1

A Financial Crisis is a situation when money demand quickly rises relative to money supply.
Until a few decades ago, a financial crisis was equivalent to a banking crisis.
Today it may also take the form of a currency crisis.
Many economists have come up with theories on how a financial crisis develops and how it could be prevented.
There is, however, no consensus and financial crises are still a regular phenomenon.
A stock market crash is an example of a financial crisis.

From the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6958091.stm

What happened in previous financial crises, and what are the lessons for today? There have been a growing number of financial crises in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The key lessons (or at least some of them) of previous major financial crises are:

Globalisation has increased the frequency and spread of financial crises, but not necessarily their severity. (Globalisation is a double edged sword - it can help, but it can hurt too)
Early intervention by central banks is more effective in limiting their spread than later moves. (Prevention of a Financial crisis is better than cure. But the problem is - until just before the bubble bursts, it is sooo much fun!!! It looks like win-win for all and everyone seems to believe to be in a state of perpetual prosperity. People are just unwilling / unable to see a crash coming or a bubble bursting. Most likely, this shall happen at least once in every generation, when the memory has faded / not been formed and new blood is willing to experiment and take high risks / or perhaps higher risks than the previous generation / or perhaps they think that they are much smarter than the older generation, LOL. Or perhaps not. Hats off to the craziness / frenzy of the people in the 1920s (1921 to early 1929) ---> they mush be the wackiest of all times, LOL :) Kidding. They were nice people, just caught up in the wave and enthusiasm, while being unaware of the insider tradings and the manipulation of the financial system by the big players / traders in the market - some of whom safely cashed out during the peak and exited / parachuted safely at the right time - liquid, before the crash).

It is difficult to tell at the time whether a financial crisis will have broader economic consequences. (No one can predict the future 100% accurately. No one can accurately pinpoint / time the crash and the effects. This is an area that needs more research. Financial ratios and analysis can help. With time, perhaps, we can do a better job of predicting crises. But then again, there is conflict of interest. Why would anyone make it public? Coz there is huge money to be made while the bubble is building up and there is huge money to be made when the bubble pops! People who can predict this rather make money out of it, rather then tell the world about it and lower their chances of profiting from the process. Why risk a good thing - good for the smart financial investors, that is. Human beings are extremely intelligent. There are people steps ahead of others in terms of financial expertise, just like there are people way behind others.)

Regulators often cannot keep up with the pace of financial innovation that may trigger a crisis. (The people in the private financial industry are EXTREMELY smart. Concepts like Margin Call, CDOs were smart innovations. It looks simple in retrospect, but it was smart financial engineering. Just like people build new inventions, there are brilliant inventors in the financial world too. The governments however, perhaps does not have these smart innovators. Perhaps the government jobs are not attractive enough. Perhaps they do not pay as much. Perhaps there are no million dollar bonuses in the government to reward financial innovation or financial forensics. Perhaps there are no "GreenPeace or Robinhood - not for profit NGOs to help - I know, eh? 'Not for profit Financial experts' seems like an oxymoron, LOL. Duh!" Financial Smarts on the right side of the law to track that something is wrong. The point however, is that these were not illegal. These were legal financial innovations. However, their side effects were long term, while the short term had this amazing win-win for all scenario!)

(P.S: The sentences in Blue above were written by me, and are not from the original article by BBC. - Gerry)

Another useful online resource for International Financial Crises: http://www.internationaleconomics.net/crisis.html
(The webpage above is more general in nature and collects research on the phenomenon of financial crises).

Since the 1980s, the march of GLOBALISATION and concomitant increases in flows of capital and trade have led to high volatility in international financial markets. Some of these have erupted into crises, in the form of runs on banks - both national and multinational - as well as attacks on currencies. Resultant effects have included the significant increase in contagion and the collapse of both venerable private banks as well as national institutions. Some research on episodes of currency crises: here.

Some info covered on the webpage above:

As always, our Wiki friend is an extremely useful source. Check out the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis#History

A noted survey of financial crises is This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Reinhart & Rogoff 2009), by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who are regarded as among the foremost historians of financial crises. In this survey, they trace the history of financial crisis back to sovereign defaults – default on public debt, – which were the form of crisis prior to the 18th century and continue, then and now causing private bank failures; crises since the 18th century feature both public debt default and private debt default. Reinhart and Rogoff also class debasement of currency and hyperinflation as being forms of financial crisis, broadly speaking, because they lead to unilateral reduction (repudiation) of debt.

Before 17th century:
Reinhart and Rogoff trace inflation (to reduce debt) to Dionysius of Syracuse, of the 4th century BCE, and begin their "eight centuries" in 1258; debasement of currency also occurred under the Roman empire and Byzantine empire.
Among the earliest crises Reinhart and Rogoff study is the 1340 default of England, due to setbacks in its war with France (the Hundred Years' War; see details). Further early sovereign defaults include seven defaults by imperial Spain, four under Philip II, three under his successors.

17th century:

1637: Bursting of tulip mania^* in the Netherlands – while tulip mania is popularly reported as an example of a financial crisis, and was a speculative bubble, modern scholarship holds that its broader economic impact was limited to negligible, and that it did not precipitate a financial crisis.

18th century:

1720: Bursting of South Sea Bubble (Great Britain) and Mississippi Bubble (France) – earliest of modern financial crises; in both cases the company assumed the national debt of the country (80–85% in Great Britain, 100% in France), and thereupon the bubble burst.
Crisis of 1772
Panic of 1792
Panic of 1796–1797

19th century:

Danish state bankruptcy of 1813
Panic of 1819 – pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures; culmination of U.S.'s 1st boom-to-bust economic cycle
Panic of 1825 – pervasive British economic recession in which many British banks failed, & Bank of England nearly failed
Panic of 1837 – pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures; a 5 yr depression ensued
Panic of 1847 – a collapse of British financial markets associated with the end of the 1840s railroad boom.
Panic of 1857 – pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures
Panic of 1866 – the Overend Gurney crisis (primarily British)
Panic of 1873 – pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures, known then as the 5 yr Great Depression & now as the Long Depression
Panic of 1884
Panic of 1890
Panic of 1893 – a panic in the United States marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures
Australian banking crisis of 1893
Panic of 1896 – an acute economic depression in the United States precipitated by a drop in silver reserves and market concerns on the effects it would have on the gold standard

20th century:

Panic of 1901 – limited to crashing of the New York Stock Exchange
Panic of 1907 – pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures
Panic of 1910–1911
1910 – Shanghai rubber stock market crisis
Wall Street Crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression – the largest and most important economic depression in the 20th century
1973 – 1973 oil crisis – oil prices soared, causing the 1973–1974 stock market crash.
Secondary banking crisis of 1973–1975 – United Kingdom.
1980s – Latin American debt crisis – beginning in Mexico in 1982 with the Mexican Weekend
Bank stock crisis (Israel 1983)
1987 – Black Monday (1987) – the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history
1989–91 – United States Savings & Loan crisis
1990 – Japanese asset price bubble collapsed
early 1990s – Scandinavian banking crisis: Swedish banking crisis, Finnish banking crisis of 1990s
1992–93 – Black Wednesday – speculative attacks on currencies in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism
1994–95 – 1994 economic crisis in Mexico – speculative attack and default on Mexican debt
1997–98 – 1997 Asian Financial Crisis – devaluations and banking crises across Asia
1998 Russian financial crisis

21st century:

2000–2001 – Turkish Crises
2001 – Argentine Crises
2001 – Bursting of dot-com bubble – speculations concerning internet companies crashed
2007–11 – Financial crisis of 2007–2011, followed by the late 2000s recession and the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis