Economic History of Financial Crises
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course tracing financial panics from the industrial era to the present. Lecture materials cover the growth of the industrial world and the banking crises it produced, the Great Depression and the policy responses that followed, the 1970s oil crisis, Japan's long stagnation after its asset bubble collapsed, and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The course builds a comparative framework for understanding why panics recur, what triggers them, and how governments and central banks have responded across more than a century of episodes. Materials include lecture notes and readings drawn from economic history scholarship, structured around these case studies rather than abstract theory alone. There is no instructor video component; the course is delivered through MIT's published course materials, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits anyone wanting a grounded, case-based economic history of financial instability rather than a textbook survey.