The Fiscal Motive for Monetary and Banking Legislation in Argentina, Australia and Canada Before 1914

Abstract

Because people have expected so much from banking systems, their evolution has invariably been a subject of great controversy in developing economies. The result of this is that the historian of banking has a hard time of it discounting a historiography replete with the deceptions of generations of publicists; and the problem is if anything made worse by the readiness of many readers in countries with mature financial systems to regard banking as a technical, and hence a non-controversial, matter. Comparison of the banking history of countries with broadly similar patterns of development, like those considered here, offers one solution to this historiographical problem. It throws into relief some of the more outstanding variations between national interpretations, and so suggests where close questioning might best be directed. Since variations only make sense in relation to established themes, this paper begins by outlining four common patterns of interpretation of banking history against which the history of each country is then set.