A followup on this post. We had frequent banking panics before there was a Fed; how bad were they?

Well, Christy Romer has an old paper on long-run volatility, in which she created a metric: percentage-point months of industrial production lost until previous peak was regained:

So some of those pre-Fed panics were worse than the big slumps of 1974 and 1981, although far short of Great Depression stuff.

By my estimate, the current number using industrial production data is 455; it will get a bit bigger but not much if the recovery continues.

So we’re doing worse than after, say, the Panic of 1907 — but not that much worse.