Academic literature on the topic 'Bank failures Victoria'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategies and dynamics of the fledging accounting professional project in the context of boom, bust and reform in colonial Victoria. In doing so, the study provides evidence of the association of members of the Incorporated Institute of Accountants, Victoria (IIAV) (1886) and other auditors with banks that failed during the early 1890s Australian banking crisis, and addresses the implications for the professionalisation trajectory. Design/methodology/approach The study uses primary sources, including the surviving audited financial statements of a selection of 14 Melbourne-based failed banks, reports of relevant company meetings and other press reports and commentaries, along with relevant secondary sources, and applies theoretical analysis informed by the literature on the sociology of the professions. Findings IIAV members as bank auditors are shown to have been associated with most of the bank failures examined in this study, thereby not being immune from key problems in bank auditing and accounting of the period. The study shows how the IIAV, while part of the problem, ultimately became part of a solution that was regarded within the association’s leadership as less than optimal, essentially by means of 1896 legislative reforms in Victoria, and also addresses the associated implications. Practical implications The study reveals how a deeper understanding of economic and social problems in any context may be obtainable by examining surviving financial statements and related records sourced from archives of surviving business records. Originality/value The study elucidates accounting’s professionalisation trajectory in a colonial setting during respective periods of boom, bust and reform from the 1880s until around 1896 and provides insights into the development of financial auditing practices, which is still an important topic.

The English journalist and author Philip Gibbs established many of the mythological conventions of the Titanic sinking – the luxury of a ship believed to be unsinkable; insufficient lifeboats; women and children first; the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’; the failure of a nearby ship to respond to distress signals; and the heroism of the doomed passengers. Gibbs’ language choices in reporting on the Titanic reflected late-Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to chivalry, heroism, masculinity and nationality. Later, as one of the most influential war correspondents working on the Western Front, he consistently drew on this same anachronistic rhetoric to describe mass industrialized warfare. In 1912, and across almost four years of war, Gibbs celebrated glory's triumph over tragedy. In this confrontation with danger, stoic endurance and acceptance of martyrdom were proof that a person was both a man and a Briton.

The collapse of neoliberalism since September and October of 2008 has been sudden and spectacular. The failure of the ideas sustaining the Washington Consensus and the practices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seems nearly complete. The new world we may be entering could have a dramatically different political opportunity structure than the old one. But what will take its place? What has the Left to offer? What has it learned in recent decades that have been filled with more defeats than victories? What will it have to offer right now when millions are seeking solutions? Our contributors possess no crystal ball. Our answers to these questions are framed historically. How have left movements learned from defeat in the past? What factors have enabled them to exploit moments of opportunity? Analyzing the immediate historical context to the present crisis, historians can suggest which measures promise the most hope of success and which seem doomed to failure. To this end, the papers in this collection concern themselves with left victory and defeat. They show that victory and defeat are more problematic than we might think. Each raises its own particular set of challenges and concerns.

The article is concerned with the first Russian translation of Charles Kingsley’s (1819–1875) The Water Babies (1863), one of the most controversial children’s books written by a British author: rich in allusions and quotations and disguised as a fairy tale, it features a powerful social commentary and a stinging satire of the Victorian society. On the back of the popularity of British children’s books, the novel was translated and published in 1874 — the second major work by C. Kingsley (who had been generously promoted by A. Kraevsky on the pages of Otechestvennye Zapiski) to have been printed in Russia, and the first ever translation of The Water Babies. The book, under the Russian title of The Adventures of Fomushka, the Chimney-Sweep, above Ground and under Water [Priklyucheniya Fomushki-trubochista na zemle i pod vodoyu], was lavishly illustrated, boasted a large print run and was extensively advertised in periodicals; yet it proved to be a failure. Its publication undermined Kingsley’s popularity in Russia and allowed ‘pochvennichestvo’- leaning reviewers to question the value of English children’s literature in general.

Understanding the reasons and cues for migration is crucial for developing effective conservation and management strategies of diadromous fishes. Spawning and movement patterns of the threatened diadromous Australian grayling (Prototroctes maraena) were investigated in the Bunyip River, Victoria, using drift sampling (2008–2011) and acoustic telemetry (2009–2010) during the autumn–winter spawning period of each year. Fifty-five adult fish (2009: n = 21; 2010: n = 34) were tagged and released in February ~15–30 km upstream of the Bunyip River estuary. Thirteen fish (2009: n = 7; 2010: n = 6) undertook rapid downstream migrations from March to April to reaches immediately upstream of the estuary. Drifting eggs were detected at multiple sites between April and July; however, the majority (78.8%) were collected in the lower reaches within ~0.5 km of the estuary in early–mid-May. Tagged adult fish arrived in this area 1–4 weeks before eggs were detected and usually moved back upstream within 2 weeks following the peak egg abundance. Downstream migration and peak egg abundance were associated with increased river flows. Although the proportion of fish that undertook migrations was low, low rates of tag retention in this species likely account for the failure to detect migration by many of the tagged individuals.

The last century is filled with victories and failures, passions, and interests. World wars and revolutions, the change of political regimes, ideologies, and ideological orientations — all this provoked a formation of social and political chaos, which sometimes had to be overcome in a totalitarian way through sole commanding and by one-party dictatorship. At the same time, one can observe the successes of cognition, culture, scientific and technological development, which, however, can hardly be called “progress”. Because the mass destruction weapons of certain “partners” in globalism have also been increased. Ready for self-destruction, “man in time” did not become yet the master of his destiny in the last century, but in many ways remained a mystery to himself. Despite the fact that over the past century man has learned a lot about his own psychology, consciousness and subconscious, he still needs further self-knowledge no less than in those times when the Oracle of Delphi called for it. Today, as ancient times, one needs to know better what motivates his sometimes rational, and sometimes, mildly speaking, very strange behavior. Who is man in time? To understand this, one must go beyond the limits of itself being to other times and spaces. Even to times and spaces of a cosmic scale, to the spaces and to the depths of our Universe, where a man was born and will disappear, perhaps preserved in its cosmic memory. The memory of the Universe is symbolized by world constants that arose as a result of the Big Bang and the birth of the Universe from a singularity point. Memory of man inherits this property of the Cosmos. The memory is a system-forming factor that creates man and its world. This is what rigorous science can offer to explain the cosmic origin of man and his memory. Artistic imagery can continue the efforts of science. Culture, literature, first of all, can create imageries that will tell about man and his time more than abstract theory. The imageries will tell that man has not yet lost his freedom of creativity. He must remember the past, live in the present, look and go to the future.

Abstract: “The strong Baltic nationalistic centre” and Soviet foreign propaganda: from war to peace and toward the Cold War This special issue focuses on censorship, but it is difficult to treat censorship without also considering propaganda. This article discusses both censorship and foreign propaganda as complementary tools in the Soviet Union’s arsenal for manipulating public opinion in foreign countries. The purpose of such action was to shape the behaviour of those states to further Soviet interests. The article focuses on the use of propaganda and censorship in Soviet efforts to settle the “Baltic question”– the question of the future of the Baltic countries – in the 1940s. This was the time when the wartime alliance was crumbling and giving way to a cold-war confrontation. The article is based on Russian archival sources. The Molotov collection (F. 82), materials of the department of propaganda and agitation of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU (F. 17, opis 125), and of the CC department of international information (F. 17, opis 128) are stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-political History (RGASPI). The collection of the Soviet Information Bureau (F. R8581) is located at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The article also draws on previous research on Soviet propaganda, such as Vladimir Pechatnov’s and Wolfram Eggeling’s studies on the work of the Soviet Information Bureau (SIB) and on discussions in the Soviet propaganda apparatus in the early postwar years. However, this article digs somewhat deeper and alongside general developments, also looks at a particular case – the Baltic problem in the Soviet contest with the West for winning hearts and minds. It analyses Soviet policies without attempting to uncover and reconstruct all the twists and turns of the decision-making processes in Moscow. The archival material is insufficient for the latter task. Nevertheless, a look into the making of Soviet propaganda, the techniques and practices utilised to bring Soviet influence to bear on an important foreign-policy issue (the Baltic problem), is interesting for scholars working not only on propaganda and censorship but also on the history of the Soviet Union and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic question was related, among other things, to the problem of repatriating people from the territories of the Soviet Union who had been displaced during the Second World War and were located in Western Europe at the war’s end. Moscow claimed that all these displaced persons (DPs) were Soviet citizens. This article helps correct the view, expressed for example by the Finnish scholar Simo Mikkonen, that the Soviet propaganda campaign to attract the remaining 247,000 recalcitrants back home started after a UN decision of 1951 that condemned repatriation by force. This article clearly shows that propaganda policies aimed at the DPs were in place almost immediately after the war, resting on the war-time experience of conducting propaganda aimed at national minorities in foreign countries. However, Mikkonen is right to point out that, in general, repatriation after the Second World War was a success, as approximately five million people in total returned to the USSR. The Baltic refugees were a notable exception in this regard. Research shows that despite displays of obligatory optimism, Soviet propagandists could critically evaluate the situation and the effectiveness of Soviet agitation. They understood that war-time successes were the result of the coincidence of a number of favourable factors: victories of the Red Army, Allied censorship and propaganda, the penetration by Soviet agents of the British propaganda apparatus, etc. They knew that the British media was extensively controlled and served as a virtual extension of Soviet censorship and propaganda. Nevertheless, the Soviets were wrong to assume that in the West, the free press was nothing but an empty slogan. Moscow was also wrong to expect that the Western media, which had worked in the Soviet interest during the war, could as easily be turned against the Soviet Union as it had been directed to support the USSR by political will. In actual fact, the Soviet Union started receiving negative press primarily because earlier checks on journalistic freedom were lifted. The Soviet Union may have been a formidable propaganda state internally, but in foreign propaganda it was an apprentice. Soviet propagandists felt inferior compared to their Western counterparts, and rightly so. In October of 1945, an official of the SIB noted jealously that the Foreign Department of the British Information Ministry had two thousand clerks and there were four hundred British propagandists in the United States alone. Another Soviet official in the London embassy noted in February of 1947 that they had so few staff that he was working under constant nervous strain. Soviet propagandists were aware of the problems but could not effect fundamental changes because of the nature of the Stalinist regime. The issue of foreign journalists working in Moscow was a case in point. The correspondents were handicapped in their work by extremely strict censorship. They could report mostly only those things that also appeared in Soviet newspapers, which was hardly interesting for their readers in the West. There had been suggestions that some restrictions should be lifted so that they could do more useful work and tell more interesting and attractive stories about the Soviet Union. Eventually, during Stalin’s first postwar vacation in the autumn of 1945, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov took the initiative and tried to ease the life of the press corps, but this only served to provoke the ire of Stalin who proceeded to penalise Molotov in due course. This showed that the system could not be changed as long as the extremely suspicious vozhd remained at the helm. Not only did correspondents continue to send unexciting content to newspapers abroad (which often failed to publish them), the form and style of Soviet articles, photos and films were increasingly unattractive for foreign audiences. Such propaganda could appeal only to those who were already “believers”. It could hardly convert. Moscow considered the activities of Baltic refugees in the West and the publicity regarding the Baltic problem a serious threat to the stability of the Soviet position in the newly occupied Baltic countries. Already during the war, but even more vigorously after the war, the Soviet propaganda apparatus realised the importance of tuning and adapting its propaganda messages for audiences among the Baltic diaspora. The Soviet bureaucracy expanded its cadres to enable it to tackle the Baltic “threat”. Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian officials were dispatched to the central organs in Moscow and to Soviet embassies abroad to provide the necessary language skills and qualifications for dealing with Baltic propaganda and working with the diaspora. The policy was to repatriate as many Balts as possible, but it was soon clear that repatriation along with the complementary propaganda effort was a failure. The next step was to start discrediting leaders of the Baltic diaspora and to isolate them from the “refugee masses”. This effort also failed. The “anti-Soviet hotbed” of “intrigues and espionage” – the words of the Estonian party boss Nikolai Karotamm – continued to operate in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere until the end of the Cold War. All this time, the diaspora engaged in anti-Communist propaganda and collaborated with Western propaganda and media organisations, such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and even Vatican Radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, the diaspora was instrumental in assisting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to regain their independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. They also helped their native countries to “return to Europe” – that is to join Western structures such as the European Union and NATO. Therefore, the inability to deal with the Baltic problem effectively in the 1940s caused major concerns for the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and contributed to its eventual demise.

The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests, Enderby Jackson, later wrote in his autobiography that other business dealings prevented him from further involvement in the series. Jackson had made full use of his talents and contacts to bring these remarkable working-class musical ensembles to the emergent national attraction that was the Crystal Palace. However, Jackson's manipulation of publicity and managerial style obstruct easy analysis of the contests. Moreover, Jackson later sought to protect his legacy by conjuring a smokescreen in his memoirs to obscure the real reasons for the failure of the Crystal Palace contests after 1863. The entrepreneurial environment is never a stable one, and it should not be presumed that the accolades accorded to the opening contest would translate into its continuance on an annual basis. However, the fact that the contests were attended by many thousands of visitors each year and Jackson's assertion that they were a financial success stand in stark contrast to what is implied by their sudden end. This article demonstrates how close examination of previously unconsidered letters, surviving documentation, and other sources cast doubt on whether the contest series was ever an extraordinary success.

This article considers the history of Fort Pitt (1780-1922), its military hospital (founded 1814) and, in particular, its Army Medical School (1860–63). The museum and library were the work of the hospital’s first directors: Dr David MacLoughlin and Sir James McGrigor, the latter the renowned reformer of military medical education. Central to the foundation of the medical school was Florence Nightingale who visited the site in 1856. The school opened in 1860 with five sets of students attending before it was transferred in 1863 to the Royal Victoria hospital, Netley, Hampshire. Fort Pitt was a “practical” medical school with students attending for 4-9 months of clinical experience. This included “instruction in tropical medicine” delivered by members of the Indian Medical Service. The foundation of a military medical school fulfilled an ambition dating back to at least 1796. Nightingale’s role (exerted through Sidney Herbert) was omitted from contemporary newspaper reports. Fort Pitt continued as a military hospital until 1922 when it was converted to a school. The medical school constitutes a landmark in British military medicine, a response to the failure of British medical care in the Crimean war (1853–1856) and a forgotten legacy of Florence Nightingale.

The great personalities of history have also achieved success with the talented administrators, commanders and scientists around them and immortalized their names. Saladdin Ayyubi, who gained a rightful reputation in the East and West as one of the greatest leaders of the Middle Ages by taking back Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, is one of these leaders. It is necessary to look for the successes of Saladin, who realized his victories and important works with his astute and loyal men around him. Along with Jewish and Christian physicians, his converting commanders contributed greatly to his success. Hüsam ad-Din Lü'lü, who is of Armenian origin, is one of them. This talented admiral, who was Saladin's eyes and ears on the seas, was one of the actors of the Crusaders' failure to capture this place for a long time, with the vital supplies and materials he brought to the city during the defense of Akkâ, which was very important for Saladin. The admiral of Saladin, who also did very important works for the social life of Egypt, made a name for himself with his generosity and the social facilities he had built, and succeeded in becoming one of the unforgettable. One of his greatest achievements was to punish the Crusaders who threatened Mecca and Madina with the portable ships they built by landing in the Red Sea when Saladin was not in Egypt and ensuring the safety of the holy places.

Chapter six follows the theme of gold versus paper money into the Victorian era by revisiting Thomas Love Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics and relating it to the history of bank failure upon which the poems satirically descant. Tennyson’s biographical and poetic interest in speculations and the consequences of their failures are followed out in discussions of his ‘Sea Dreams’ and Maud, relating anxieties about valueless promises in investments to the value of the poet’s own words in these poems. It continues the interest in poetic technique by looking particularly at how the rhyming works in money poems by Hood, Browning, Clough and Davidson. It also returns to the theme of poets’ financial straits from Chapter 3, relating it to poetic techniques in, especially, Hood and Davidson.

This chapter discusses the pivotal Battle of Bennington and its impact on the Saratoga campaign. Once Burgoyne moved from Fort Edward to Fort Miller, he ordered a large detachment of predominately German soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum to march to Bennington to capture cattle and other urgently needed supplies. Baum’s force was caught and destroyed by Americans led by Brigadier General John Stark. A relief force led by Heinrich Breymann was unsuccessful and escaped with heavy casualties. With this disaster, Burgoyne lost over 10% of his army, and most of his Indians left after the battle, which severely hurt his ability to gather intelligence. At this point, Burgoyne was faced with perhaps the most momentous decision of the campaign: continue to march to Albany or fall back to Ticonderoga. Despite the loss at Bennington and St. Leger’s failure at Stanwix, Burgoyne decided to push on.

The picture that emerges of war termination in Iraq is one of sophisticated military efforts and fragmented political activities that were powered by poor strategic empathy and untethered to an integrated strategy. As discussed in Part IV, the Bush administration assumed a decisive victory over Saddam Hussein’s fielded forces would yield lasting success. Obsessed with military details, the US government failed to develop a strategy that brought together and managed the elements of national power to bring about a favorable and durable outcome. When decisive victory failed to materialize, the United States was left scrambling for a way forward. The failure to consider war termination led to a myopic strategy that fixated on the military campaign and ignored the aftermath, and set the stage for the super-empowerment of mostly Shi’a exiles and elites and decisions to launch a de-Ba’athification campaign and disband the Iraqi Army. Aggressive military efforts fed perceptions of Sunni Arab disenfranchisement. The latter fought back, igniting a fierce insurgency. This gap in strategy heightened the risk that the war would turn into a quagmire....

While the United States established anti-smuggling treaties with many countries, and a “Rum Treaty” with Cuba, it was a small band of undercover agents in Havana who stopped the liquor traffic out of Havana, but only temporarily. Led by American Henry Kime with the help of Commander Charles S. Root of the Coast Guard Intelligence Division, these agents determined how smugglers obtained forged customs documents, and convinced Cuban Customs authorities to prevent the departure from port of suspected rum runners. It was only a temporary victory. Bureaucratic inefficiency and confusion among federal agencies involved in Prohibition enforcement, and Cuban frustration with failure of U.S. enforcement efforts overall, eventually allowed the liquor traffic to resume.

After departure from Kentucky, the army of Tennessee was undersized, starving, and insufficiently clothed for the winter. The ranks were replenished by Kentuckians who followed the army back to Tennessee, recalled men who had been on detached service, and A.W.O.L. soldiers who were promised pardons if they returned immediately. Bragg then moved the army to Middle Tennessee, near Nashville. A union army lead by William S. Rosecrans was also in the area. Jefferson Davis travelled to Chattanooga to personally assess the morale of the army of Tennessee before giving orders. The battles with Rosecrans’s forces near Stone River resulted in numerous casualties on both sides but ultimately ended with Union victories. The Army of Tennessee retreated. With success in war and the Emancipation Proclamation, Union morale was increasing. After another failure, the Confederate senators, journalists, and other public individuals debated replacing Bragg.

A murderously recurrent theme surfaces as we read the record of technology. It can be decocted into the tidy epigram: “The fastest route to success is through failure. The greatest enemy of success is success.” When my civil engineering colleague Jack Matson recognized the validity of that idea, he began vigorously to promote the concept of intelligent fast failure. He said that we can speed our own creativity if we begin by running through as many wrong or foolish ways of accomplishing our end as we can think of. That process both emboldens us and instructs us in the full range of possibility. Conversely, success that fails to keep the boundaries of error within sight eventually takes itself for granted and leaves us open to failure on a grand scale. We skirted this issue toward the end of Chapter 9; now let us look at it more closely. A story of three bridges helps to expose the complex way in which success and failure work together. Henry Petroski takes us back to the forty-six-mile rail trip from Edinburgh to Dundee, which took half a day in 1870. Passengers had to ride the ferry over two wide fjords, arms of the North Sea slicing into Scotland. They are the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth. Then an English engineer, Thomas Bouch, sold backers on the idea of building bridges over those inlets. The first was an immense two-mile bridge over the Firth of Tay. When its eighty-five spans were finished in 1877, they made up the longest bridge in the world, and Queen Victoria knighted Bouch. Disaster followed almost immediately. The Tay Bridge collapsed in 1879, killing seventy-five people. Cost-cutting had yielded a bridge that couldn’t stand up to the wind forces. Bouch died in humiliation four months later. By 1881 the Tay Bridge had been rebuilt with heavy, unbeautiful trusses, and attention turned to the second bridge, the one over the Firth of Forth. The Firth of Forth bridge was to cross where the center of the firth was a mile wide, with only one shallow spot for a central pier.

Saudi King Abdullah played a central role in rolling back non-violent, popular movement for democracy and human rights that occurred in early 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. The election of Muhammad Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, as president in Egypt’s first free and fair election in June 2012, went down badly in Riyadh. It welcomed the military coup against Morsi in July 2013. Abdullah helped to put together a package of $12 billion to shore up the military regime in Cairo. Iran described the popular demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain as Islamic Awakening, and welcomed Morsi’s victory. But it failed to pin that label on the peaceful protests in Syria under President Bashar Assad, affiliated to the Alawi sub-sect in Shia Islam. In 2013 the Syrian civil war acquired an international dimension when the Assad regime used chemical weapons – described as a red line by US President Barack Obama. His failure to punish Assad for crossing this red line disappointed Abdullah. He ignored the fact that Obama-led tightening of economic sanctions against Iran by the US and the European Union were making Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani amenable to a compromise on the nuclear issue.

The years immediately after the 2015 general election were dominated by another vote, held in 2016. In 2013, the electoral challenge from UKIP had forced David Cameron to promise an in–out referendum on the EU should his party win the next general election. Cameron fulfilled his promise, after negotiations with the EU which only partially addressed the grievances of Eurosceptics in UKIP and within his own party. The chapter discusses the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum, arising from divisions within the UK which cut across previous party allegiances and introduced a new element of volatility in an electorate which was already barely recognizable from that of 1964. The situation was complicated further by the election of the radical left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after his party’s 2015 defeat. By contrast, when David Cameron resigned as Conservative leader and Prime Minister after the referendum he was succeeded by Theresa May, who was regarded as a pragmatic centre-right politician who could negotiate a compromise ‘Brexit’ deal with the EU. The chapter examines May’s failure to carry out this promise, marked in particular by her inept attempt to secure a convincing parliamentary majority in the 2017 general election. When May was forced from office in 2019 she was succeeded by Boris Johnson, a far more controversial and divisive character who nevertheless was able to lead the Conservatives to a comfortable electoral victory, not least because their pro-European opponents were hopelessly divided. However, the victorious Conservatives had no reason to feel complacent; even if Johnson’s government could deliver the favourable Brexit deal which it had promised, over the years since 1964 the British electorate had become far more fickle and parties were increasingly vulnerable to events outside their control. Within a few months of the 2019 election, party competition in Britain, which had seemed so stable back in 1964, was exposed to a new and deadly source of disturbance—the outbreak in China of the Covid-19 virus—which presented the most serious challenge faced by any UK government since 1945.