Continental Illinois

Certainly the business school, uh, is.

And so, so, um, my first job out of, of, uh, uh, the MBA program was working for a bank in Chicago called Continental Illinois Bank, which doesn't exist anymore.

Bank of America bought 'em in the, in the '90s and, and I went through a very, um, uh, comprehensive training program there and did well in the program, so got to pick where I would go, you know, within the bank, which was kind of nice.

And I volunteered to, to, to, uh, to be posted in the workout group 'cause I just thought that's where I was gonna learn the most.

So far, I have spent less than $50 and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.

If you want to stop the killing, then wire $1 million to bank account number 844-9597 at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, Illinois.

Don't attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter.

A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything you can possibly do.

On October 6th, Johnson & Johnson's Director of Security distributed to the Tylenol Strategy Committee a handwritten letter that had been sent to the company.

The author claimed familiarity with placing cyanide into capsules and demanded that Johnson & Johnson wire $1 million to account number 844-9597 at Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago.

The letter threatened additional deaths if the demand was not met.

And the letter read, gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to place cyanide, both potassium and sodium, into capsules sitting on store shelves.

If you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing.

So far, I have spent less than $50 and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.

If you want to stop the killing, then wire $1 million to bank account number 844-9597 at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, Illinois.

Don't attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter.

The great financial crisis of 2008 is already among the most studied.

Are firms at higher risk today? Some argue that governmental intervention happens too often in the credit markets, with one of the initial interventions, the bailout of Continental Illinois Bank during the Reagan administration.

Once too big to fail was institutionalized, the cost of debt fell for risky financial institutions at the same time as laissez-faire regulation was taking hold.

This encouraged expansion of balance sheet risks.

And he played a very active role orchestrating these kinds of interventions.

Continental Illinois in 1984 is probably the most famous one of those.

And then third, Volcker was very concerned to make sure that his tightening policies would not destabilize the market for Treasury debt.

He fully recognized not only the Federal Reserve's responsibility for ensuring an orderly market to allow the Treasury to sell its debt and fund itself, but also the fact that the Treasury bill market had over time, since the 1950s, come to play an absolutely central role in what is called the repo market, where banks source their short-term funding, and especially large shadow banks source their short-term funding.

Now, in my book on the bailout state, I look more closely at what this new era meant inside Western countries and in particular the U.S.

So perhaps to kind of pick up the story from these sorts of emerging too-big-to-fill policies, during the 1980s, these consolidated into a regime of sorts.

There was the Continental Illinois bill out in 1984.

In the same year, the controller of the currency declared that the nation's largest banks were simply too big to fill and that their creditors were effectively insured by the government.