From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:

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..... Six hundred and fifty years ago came the climax of the worst financial collapse and bank crash in history in the 1340s, which decimated the human population.

The crash, which peaked in 1345 when the world's biggest banks went under, "led" by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies [families] of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash, it was a financial disintegration. In Europe,chronicler's reported,"all credit vanished together", most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed.

Like the financial disintegration hanging over us in late 1994 and 1995 with the collapse of Mexico, Orange County, British merchant banks, etc., that one of the 1340's was the result of 30-40 years of disastrous financial practices, by which the banks built up huge fictitious "financial bubbles,'' parasitizing production and real trade in goods. These speculative cancers destroyed the real wealth they were monopolizing, and caused these banks to be effectively bankrupt long before they finally went under.

The critical difference between 1345 and 1995, was that in the fourteenth century there were no nations. No governments had the national sovereignty to control the banks and the creation of credit or to force these banks into bankruptcy in an orderly way and replace fictitious bank credit and money with national credit. Nor was the Vatican, the world leadership of the Catholic Church, fighting against the debt-looting of the international banks; in fact,at that time it was allied with, aiding,and abetting them .

The result was a disaster for the human population, which fell worldwide by something like 25 per cent between 1300 and 1450 (in Europe,by somewhere between 35 percent and 50 per cent from the 1340's collapse to the 1440's).....

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-venice-rigged-first-and-worst.html