Reflections on Northern Rock: The Bank Run that Heralded the Global Financial Crisis

I n September 2007, television viewers and newspaper readers around the world saw pictures of what looked like an old-fashioned bank run—that is, depositors waiting in line outside the branch offices of a United Kingdom bank called Northern Rock to withdraw their money. The previous U.K. bank run before Northern Rock was in 1866 at Overend Gurney, a London bank that overreached itself in the railway and docks boom of the 1860s. Bank runs were not uncommon in the United States up through the 1930s, but they have been rare since the start of deposit insurance backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In contrast, deposit insurance in the United Kingdom was a partial affair, funded by the banking industry itself and insuring only a part of the deposits—at the time of the run, U.K. bank deposits were fully insured only up to 2,000 pounds, and then only 90 percent of the deposits up to an upper limit of 35,000 pounds. When faced with a run, the incentive to withdraw one’s deposits from a U.K. bank was therefore very strong. For economists, the run on Northern Rock at first seemed to offer a rare opportunity to study at close quarters all the elements involved in their theoretical models of bank runs: the futility of public statements of reassurance, the mutually reinforcing anxiety of depositors, as well as the power of the media in galvanizing and channeling that anxiety through the power of television images. However, the storyline of the Northern Rock bank run does not fit the conventional narrative. On September 13, 2007, the BBC’s evening television news broadcast first broke the news that Northern Rock had sought the Bank of England’s support. The next morning, the Bank of England announced that it would provide emergency liquidity support. It was only after that announcement—that is, after the