The recent Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin has a really nice article on the City of Glasgow Bank crash which occurred in October 1878 - click here for the article and see below for an interview with one of the the authors. This article draws very heavily on my 2008 paper on the City of Glasgow Bank crash and my book Banking in Crisis. The authors do a great job of outlining seven lessons from the crash for modern-day policymakers.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.