Lender of last resort in the context of "Bank runs"

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international financial institution and a specialized agency of the United Nations, headquartered in Washington, D.C. It consists of 191 member countries, and its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." The IMF acts as a lender of last resort to its members experiencing actual or potential balance of payments crises.

Established in July 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference based on the ideas of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, the IMF came into formal existence in 1945 with 29 member countries and the goal of reconstructing the international monetary system. For its first three decades, the IMF oversaw the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rate arrangements. Following the collapse of this system in 1971, the Fund's role shifted to managing balance-of-payments difficulties and international financial crises, becoming a key institution in the era of globalization.

The Icelandic financial crisis was a major economic and political event in Iceland between 2008 and 2010. It involved the default of all three of the country's major privately owned commercial banks in late 2008, following problems in refinancing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland's systemic banking collapse was the largest of any country in economic history. The crisis led to a severe recession and the 2009 Icelandic financial crisis protests.

In the years preceding the crisis, three Icelandic banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir, multiplied in size. This expansion was driven by ready access to credit in international financial markets, in particular money markets. As the 2008 financial crisis unfolded, investors perceived the Icelandic banks to be increasingly risky. Trust in the banks gradually faded, leading to a sharp depreciation of the Icelandic króna in 2008 and increased difficulties for the banks in rolling over their short-term debt. At the end of the second quarter of 2008, Iceland's external debt was 9.553 trillion Icelandic krónur (€50 billion), more than 7 times the GDP of Iceland in 2007. The assets of the three banks totaled 14.437 trillion krónur at the end of the second quarter 2008, equal to more than 11 times the national GDP. Due to the huge size of the Icelandic financial system in comparison with the Icelandic economy, the Central Bank of Iceland was unable to act as a lender of last resort during the crisis, further aggravating the mistrust in the banking system.

Hyman Philip Minsky (September 23, 1919 – October 24, 1996) was an American economist and economy professor at Washington University in St. Louis. A distinguished scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, his research was intent on providing explanations to the characteristics of financial crises, which he attributed to swings in a potentially fragile financial system.

Minsky is often described as a post-Keynesian economist because, in the Keynesian tradition, he supported some government intervention in financial markets, opposed some of the financial deregulation of the 1980s, stressed the importance of the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort and argued against the over-accumulation of private debt in the financial markets.