Bret Devereaux

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...

...a large, interest-free, 3-year loan to bankers when loans at the time were rarely extended for more than a few months. This was unprecedented, and was unlikely to be a response to a minor matter.

It was not unprecedented. Tiberius' two immediate predecessors, Julius Caesar and Octavian had made similarly sized donations to either the people of Rome, the public treasury, or both.

Octavian (Augustus) is at pains to point out that he made similarly massive donations to the public (RG 15) and that he bailed out the public treasury no less than four times, at a number significantly greater than what Tiberius spent (RG 17)