Until Further Notice: Emergency Decisions in Money and Credit and the Records of Their End, c. 1750 BC – AD 2023

When an authority stops a payment, closes the banks, lends to a failing market or forgives a debt, it usually says the measure is for now. This study reads twenty-four of Skeptron's records of such emergency acts, from a law of Hammurabi's reign to the rescue of Credit Suisse in 2023, beside the words their actors wrote, and codes eighty-four on the same fields. It asks whether a record says how long the act was meant to last, on what condition it would end, and who paid while it stood. Most records keep the act and lose its end; fewer still name who bore its cost. The actors' own texts, where they survive, often say more: a proclamation that named its days, a central bank's exception with an expiry date, an ordinance that gave itself six months.