Just finished Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street (1873). Bagehot was the editor of The Economist in the 1860s and 1870s. This book sketches out London's banking and finance system and, particularly, how liquidity crises are handled.
Perry Mehrling wrote “The New Lombard Street” covering all the new mechanics of international financial markets. It’s just as fascinating. He taught a course on the material called “Economics of Money and Banking.” I never felt I grokked the interplay between the Fed, USG, and Wall Street until I studied that course.
https://archive.org/details/lombardstreetad00bagegoog/page/n...