La banca y las crisis financieras en la literatura popular: Una fortuna peligrosa, de Ken Follett

Ken Follett’s best-seller, A Dangerous Fortune, in addition to the usual ingredients of this kind of popular literature, contains much economic information: it tells the story of a bank, a fictitious one, but with operations and problems identical to the real ones, in a succession of economic crises that in fact took place in the nineteenth century, particu¬larly those of 1866, 1878 and 1890 in Britain, respectively associated with the bankruptcies of Overend, Gurney & Co., the City of Glasgow Bank and Baring Brothers bank. The historical context, the relevance of institutional frameworks for economic development, and the organization of banks and the financial system in the times when the central bank role as lender of last resort was barely beginning to take form, are analyzed correctly in general lines. The novel thus draws a picture that includes many economic and financial references that may interest economists and historians.