Bret Devereaux

The primary source material is Tac. Ann. 6.16-17 and Suet. Tib. 48.

Though unless there is attestation in other sources, I'm not sure it quite matches the grand description given above. The senate, in a bout of moralizing, attempted to crack down on usury, stipulating that money lent at interest should be recalled and invested into land.

Presumably the intent being to convert debt assets into land assets. Instead, land prices collapsed as leveraged aristocrats rushed to sell land to cover their debts (which of course made it impossible for them to cover their debts).

So essentially, a liquidity crisis created by the senate's moralizing. Tiberius eventually resolves the problem by dumping money into the banking system and offering interest-free loans on the security of land, essentially bailing out both the bankers and the landholders.

Tacitus really wants to connect this to the Sejanus affair, but the banking crisis in in 33, Sejanus is dead in 31, so I'm not sure I buy it.

I'm not sure we should regard the affair as a major crisis. Dio gives it literally only a sentence (58.21.5) and thinks it mainly important because it resulted in the death of a notable equestrian by suicide before Tiberius bails everyone out.

I disagree. The historian Charles Bartlett called it a "severe economic crisis", and every financial and economic historian I have read on the subject thought it was a serious financial crisis. Perhaps it takes people with banking experience or knowledge of financial history...

to recognize how familiar the sequence of events were, beginning with years of capital outflows prior to the crisis. At any rate if this were only a minor event, it is hard to imagine why Tiberius, someone not famously liberal with his money, would have made such...