Assessing the 1921–1922 federal financial rescue: the War Finance Corporation Bank lending program
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Financial History Review
Abstract
The 1920–1 recession did not transpire entirely without federal intervention, as commonly believed. Following lending by several Federal Reserve banks, the federally chartered War Finance Corporation (WFC) lent to support exports and shortly after the recession, it lent aggressively to assist banks in agricultural regions, as numerous bank suspensions resulted from the agricultural depression of the early 1920s. Bank suspensions decreased markedly in 1922 to the lowest annual total during the 1921–33 period. This article assesses the impact of WFC lending on bank suspensions, and to what extent the WFC's provision of liquidity helped to resolve the existing difficulties.
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This article was originally published in Financial History Review. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565024000131.
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Association for Banking and Financial History.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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Butkiewicz, James L., and Mihaela Solcan. “Assessing the 1921–1922 Federal Financial Rescue: The War Finance Corporation Bank Lending Program.” Financial History Review, 2025, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565024000131.
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