Banking & Finance

<p><span class="deck">How J. P. Morgan, like a “one-man Federal Reserve,” calmed the bankers and helped ease the Panic of 1907</span> </p>

<p>A Scottish émigré became the most powerful man in the French government, and sold hundreds of thousands of shares in land holdings in the Mississippi Valley</p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Solid-gold coins were legal tender for most of the nation's history. In their brilliant surfaces we can see our past fortunes.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Banking as we’ve known it for centuries is dead, and we don’t really know the consequences of what is taking its place. A historical overview.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power that no man of affairs will ever have again.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">200 years ago, the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then, Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a health,y young economic giant. How did he do it?</span></p>

<p>S &amp; L scandals, junk bonds, defaults: The pattern is familiar to anyone who knows about U.S. banking between 1830 and 1855.</p>

<p><span class="deck">At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> As long as there have been bankers and brokers, there have been people asking what would happen if they had to earn an honest living</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">How we became a nation of instant, constant borrowers</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">And how it grew, and grew, and grew…</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Speculators caused a stock market crash in 1792, forcing the federal government to bail out New York bankers— and the nation.</span></p>

<p>Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.</p>