In my capstone project for undergrad I summarized a couple of articles by Calomiris (one on which he was sole author, the other with Mason) about the banking collapse.
These articles were based on government records from the Great Depression that were just sitting in a warehouse
These articles were based on government records from the Great Depression that were just sitting in a warehouse
Essentially, what I can only imagine was a handful of sleep-deprived grad students went through something on the order of tens of thousands of forms from banks that had closed (I forget which agency it was under, because this all predated FDIC, SEC, etc) from 1928 to 1933 or so.
(This project is from a decade ago and I'm not going to go looking for the binders my stuff was in right now because I have to conserve my energy.)
Before all of this, historians (economic or otherwise) had surprisingly little data about the causes and mechanisms of the banking collapse, but Calomiris and his people digitized boxes and boxes of records, including assets and liabilities, date of closure, and more.
Most importantly, they had the findings by the government auditor of the actual cause of bank closure, which was previously something researchers kinda had to infer.
I don't recall the findings contradicting the overall story, but they found a lot of nuance in how it happened.
I don't recall the findings contradicting the overall story, but they found a lot of nuance in how it happened.
It also suggested better ways to model it, as I recall, but it's been most of a decade since I did this. The point is that without these kinds of records we often don't know as much as you might think even about things that are still in living memory.
