A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 2: Martin Van Buren
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 2: Martin Van Buren
Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government; Van Buren, Martin, 1782-1862
These consequences are inherent in the present system. They are not
influenced by the banks being large or small, created by National
or State Governments. They are the results of the irresistible laws
of trade or credit. In the recent events, which have so strikingly
illustrated the certain effects of these laws, we have seen the bank
of the largest capital in the Union, established under a national
charter, and lately strengthened, as we were authoritatively informed,
by exchanging that for a State charter with new and unusual
privileges--in a condition, too, as it was said, of entire soundness
and great prosperity--not merely unable to resist these effects, but
the first to yield to them.
Nor is it to be overlooked that there exists a chain of necessary
dependence among these institutions which obliges them to a great extent
to follow the course of others, notwithstanding its injustice to their
own immediate creditors or injury to the particular community in which
they are placed. This dependence of a bank, which is in proportion to
the extent of its debts for circulation and deposits, is not merely on
others in its own vicinity, but on all those which connect it with the
center of trade. Distant banks may fail without seriously affecting
those in our principal commercial cities, but the failure of the latter
is felt at the extremities of the Union. The suspension at New York in
1837 was everywhere, with very few exceptions, followed as soon as it
was known. That recently at Philadelphia immediately affected the banks
of the South and West in a similar manner. This dependence of our whole
banking system on the institutions in a few large cities is not found
in the laws of their organization, but in those of trade and exchange.
The banks at that center, to which currency flows and where it is
required in payments for merchandise, hold the power of controlling
those in regions whence it comes, while the latter possess no means
of restraining them; so that the value of individual property and the
prosperity of trade through the whole interior of the country are made
to depend on the good or bad management of the banking institutions in
the great seats of trade on the seaboard.
But this chain of dependence does not stop here. It does not terminate
at Philadelphia or New York. It reaches across the ocean and ends in
London, the center of the credit system. The same laws of trade which
give to the banks in our principal cities power over the whole banking
system of the United States subject the former, in their turn, to the
money power in Great Britain. It is not denied that the suspension of
the New York banks in 1837, which was followed in quick succession
throughout the Union, was produced by an application of that power, and
it is now alleged, in extenuation of the present condition of so large
a portion of our banks, that their embarrassments have arisen from the
same cause.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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