About Market Histories
Independent financial history, written from primary sources.
Market Histories is an independent publication covering the financial events, crises, and turning points that built the modern economy. The subject matter ranges from medieval Italian sovereign debt to the 2023 banking failures, with a deliberate weight on the long view: how each generation rediscovered the same mistakes, how the rules changed in response, and how the next generation routed around them.
Articles are long-form. Most run between two and three thousand words. The aim is not to summarise events that are already well-known, but to reconstruct them from the documents and contemporary accounts that made them — central-bank minutes, treasury reports, bankruptcy filings, court records, the letters of the people who were in the room. The emphasis is on narrative and evidence, not commentary or forecasting.
The Editor
The publication is edited by Sam. I have a background in financial markets and have read economic history seriously for most of two decades. I started Market Histories because the kind of long, well-sourced accounts I wanted to read were either locked behind academic paywalls, scattered across half a dozen out-of-print books, or compressed into the two paragraphs a textbook can spare. The site is the publication I would have wanted to find.
My focus areas, in rough order: nineteenth- and twentieth-century banking crises; the prehistory of central banking; sovereign-debt markets from the Italian city-states to Hamilton; speculative bubbles; and the institutions — exchanges, clearinghouses, benchmarks — that nobody thinks about until they break. I write each article fully myself. Where another editor would help, I name them. Where AI tools assist with drafting or translation, the underlying research, judgement, and prose are mine.
Editorial standards
Every article is grounded in verifiable, citable sources. I draw primarily from peer-reviewed journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Economic History Review), institutional research from central banks and multilateral organisations (BIS, IMF, NBER, the Federal Reserve Bank research papers), publicly available datasets (FRED, Macrohistory Database, national archives), and published work from the historians of record on each period.
Factual claims cite their sources inline. I do not publish material that relies on unverified claims, proprietary data that cannot be independently checked, or speculative market commentary. When primary sources conflict — and on most pre-1900 episodes they do — the article notes the disagreement and the relative weight of the evidence rather than picking a side without explanation.
For the full methodology, see the Methodology page and the Editorial Policy.
What this publication does not do
Market Histories does not provide investment advice, trading signals, portfolio recommendations, or market forecasts. It does not publish opinion pieces or editorials. It does not take a house view on current monetary policy. It does not predict where prices will go. The purpose is historical understanding, and nothing published here should be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. If you are looking for any of those things, this is the wrong site.
Independence and funding
Market Histories is fully independent. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any financial institution, broker, fund, advisory firm, or industry body. Researchers and institutions cited in articles have no editorial input or approval over content. No piece is paid placement; nothing is commissioned in exchange for coverage; there are no affiliate-link products embedded in articles.
The site is funded by display advertising shown alongside articles. Advertisers have no influence on what is published, no advance view of articles, and no relationship to the editorial process. Advertising is served programmatically and the publication does not select its sponsors. If a conflict of interest with an advertiser ever arises on a specific story, the conflict will be disclosed in the article itself.
Corrections
If a published article contains a factual error, a misrepresentation of source material, or a citation that cannot be verified, I will correct it promptly and update the article's last-modified date. Substantive corrections are noted at the foot of the affected article. If you spot something wrong — or have a primary source I should have used and didn't — please get in touch through the contact page.
Languages
The English edition is the canonical version. Translations into Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hindi, and Indonesian are available via the language menu but are not currently indexed by search engines while we continue to improve translation quality. The substantive editorial work happens in English; the translations are accurate but should not yet be cited as primary versions.
For full legal terms, see the Disclaimer and Terms of Use.