A credit crisis leading to mass insolvency that is solved by a "liquidity injection" by the emperor....
—from the Hat Tip
And from David Roman's A History of Mankind substack, August 14, 2024:
A wonderfully weird story of collaborative scholarship via Reddit
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Some time ago when I was researching the reign of Roman emperor Tiberius, at the very start of the Christian era, I came across some weird stuff, not for the first time. So I embarked in what turned out to be the weirdest historical investigation of my career.
This is the 21st century and at the time I was still a corporate employee at a major bank with a pretty demanding, full-time desk job, so this story is not about digging in dusty archives or secret chambers. My investigation started in, of all places, Reddit.
I chose Reddit because I’m a long-time, if frustrated, user (u/aussiesta) and I knew there are plenty of obsessives with time on their hands there and I was very suspicious about what appeared to be a very neat tale about Tiberius and a Roman financial panic in 33 AD. So I put up a call for help (notice the typo in the headline, that Reddit won’t allow correction for):
The moderators in the r/badhistory Reddit promptly banned my post (you can see it only with the direct link) as being in breach of the arcane and pretty senseless r/badhistory rules, preventing posts framed as questions.
I also put up a similar question in the Roman Reddit forum, which nobody took up, because r/ancientrome, sadly, is filled with undergraduates searching for other people to write their essays for them, and asking each other who the most awesome Roman emperor was, and what your top 10 Roman generals of all time are; still, I did try:
Let’s step back for a minute, and explain why this is important. The thing with the story about the Roman financial panic of 33 AD is that the story has been cited, quite often, in one of my fields of professional, non-historical expertise: macroeconomics.
I was a macro reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News for a decade, and every once in a while I came across vague references to that event, as being the first recorded use of “quantitative easing” (to simplify: government purchase of private debt) in history. That really is the reason why I finally became intrigued enough about it and came across the dubious narrations and unbelievable characters that I describe above.
There was a surprisingly neat ending to this story. Just I was conducting my own research in my spare time, an user in r/badhistory, who saw my post just before the moderators took it down, narrowly beat me to the historical truth. And he published it in another post, the very next day:
....MUCH MORE
HT: MetaFilter's "Let’s step back for a minute, and explain why this is important"
