Three Ages and Stages of American Money

Robert C. Hockett ()
Additional contact information
Robert C. Hockett: Cornell University

Chapter Chapter 1 in Spread the Fed, 2024, pp 5-13 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This Chapter sets the stage of Part I and the rest of the Book by recounting America’s troubled history with money and central banking from the Founding Era to 1913. In particular, it shows how our historical oscillations between favoring centralized banking and disfavoring it parallel the American polity’s broader oscillations between favoring federal and public sector capacity on the one hand, state and private sector prerogatives on the other. It is no accident, we find, that Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the U.S., which functioned as a combined money-allocating central and industry-promoting national development bank, coincided with the ascendancy of the Federalists and the new centralizing Constitution they promulgated. Nor is it an accident that our first experiment with such banking ended with the ascendancy to the White House of our most militantly anti-Federalist President, Andrew Jackson. It is also no accident, this Chapter indicates, that the first still-enduring establishment of federal supremacy over matters monetary comes with the Civil War, which both settled the question of federal supremacy in our constitutional order once and for all, and bequeathed us the national banking system, the national bank chartering authority and activity regulator (the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (‘OCC’) still within Treasury), and the currency (the ‘greenback’ dollar bill) that we use to this day even after transfer of issuance from Treasury to the Fed. Our monetary and central banking dialectic, the Chapter concludes, just is our federal versus state and our public versus private dialectics as refracted in the realm of finance.

Keywords: Anti-Federalists; Banking; Central Banking; Civil War; Dollar; Federalism; Federalists; Federal Reserve System; ‘Free’ Banking; Greenbacks; Hamilton; Jackson; OCC; Productivism; Productivist Central Banking; Productive-Republicanism; Republicanism; ‘Wildcat Banking.’ (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-72051-2_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031720512

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-72051-2_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().