Banking theories in the United States before 1860

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1755492553

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-133529

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Miller, Harry Edward http://d-nb.info/gnd/1055250875

Title:: Banking theories in the United States before 1860

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: Harvard University Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XI, 240 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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INTRODUCTION g completely with banking in a pathological state. Cliffe Leslie has justly remarked that the greatest scientific progress is made when economic disorders raise vexing questions as to their causes.! But first there must be some notion of the differences between normal and abnormal states. Before we could discuss intelli- gently the ills of our banking system, we had to have some con- ception of how a properly adjusted system functions. This our own experience had not yet given us, and the quickest way to acquire it was by digesting what the English already knew. For some reason little was done in this direction much before the turn of the quarter-century. But now there appeared among the “voluminous essays, . . . ‘thick as autumnal leaves,’”” which the currency question evoked, a significant number of works that centered less completely around the specific conditions that prompted them, and savored far more of the abstract treatment of universal problems, approached from a detached point of view. First there were Raymond’s books, then Cooper’s, Cardozo’s Phillips’s, and Lord’s. Raguet, McVickar, and Gallatin were be- ginning to write. As we turn into the eighteen-thirties the list of such writers lengthens. Men had taken the time to acquaint themselves with what had been said in England, and with the work of such writers as Say. With them the crude fallacies of Hamilton and the childish dawdlings of lesser writers disappear. The American discussion remained throughout, we have said, relatively unsophisticated. Its concepts were simpler than those of the English discussion; it ran in terms that the lay mind could more readily grasp. But it was none the less significant. In the analysis of the nature of bank deposits, of the dogma that the issue of notes against real commercial paper is self-regulative, of the nature of the business cycle, American writers seem to have reached sound conclusions before their English cousins did. That we should find inconsistencies in the writings of these early students of banking problems need not surprise us. Rather would their absence in such a formative period be strange. Problems abounded, the existence of which was not realized. 1 T. E. C. Leslie, “Political Economy in the United States,” Fortnightly Review (1880), xxxiv (old series), 401.

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