The Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), created at Yale SOM in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009, will soon conclude its flagship project: a 10-year effort to capture information about the interventions carried out during past financial crises and establish an updated playbook for fighting future crises.

The effort is called the New Bagehot Project, named for Walter Bagehot, whose 1873 book Lombard Street established the framework for responding to financial crises. The New Bagehot Project includes more than 300 case studies of individual actions by central banks and other authorities, focusing on the key design decisions of each intervention, and the results of these interventions, as well as surveys drawing wider conclusions about the lessons learned. New Bagehot Project materials are distributed through two online channels: a novel platform developed by YPFS, and YPFS’s quarterly Journal of Financial Crises. YPFS also conducted around 150 interviews with crisis decision-makers and experts to augment its document-based research with “Lessons Learned.” The nearly 19,000 primary source documents underlying this research are available through the YPFS Resource Library.

The project, says Andrew Metrick, the Janet L. Yellen Professor of Finance and Management and the director of YPFS, grew out of his experience working in the White House during the GFC, when he and other staffers were frequently “flying by the seat of our pants.”

“We had to make a lot of decisions without really understanding the history,” he says. “There had been a lot of attempts by governments to fight financial crises in the past, but we really hadn’t learned from them.”

In a future crisis, Metrick says, policymakers will be able to turn to New Bagehot to gain crucial historical context. “We have presented the knowledge so that it could be useful to somebody if they only have a few hours between when they learn of the problem and when they’re going to need to show up at a meeting with ideas. And perhaps even more important, we highlight the ideas that didn’t turn out so well. If we succeed, the next time there is a crisis, we will not make nearly as many mistakes.”