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7 - Two Banks and One Money, 1711–1791

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Stephen Quinn
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University
William Roberds
Affiliation:
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
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Summary

This chapter again uses data from the Bank’s ledgers, cash books, and other records to examine its policy decisions over much of the eighteenth century (1711—1791). Examination of these data indicates that the Bank’s accounting was highly focused on accurate tabulation of the total stock of Bank money. It is argued that this money stock had two functional components, de facto splitting the bank into two institutions: a passive bank whose money originated from customers’ deposits of coins under receipt, and an active bank whose money originated from open market purchases of metallic assets and credit operations. The data show that from 1727 forward, the active portion of the Bank’s money was systematically adjusted to balance out (sterilize) fluctuations in the passive portion. The chapter also discusses two crisis episodes when this policy approach broke down: (1) a financial panic in the autumn of 1763 that required a liberalization of the receipt system, leading to unbalanced expansion of the passive bank; (2) excessive lending to the Dutch East India Company during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780—1784), leading to a contraction of the passive portion and overexpansion of the active. The effects of the latter crisis were sufficiently severe that the Bank never fully recovered.

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Chapter
Information
How a Ledger Became a Central Bank
A Monetary History of the Bank of Amsterdam
, pp. 174 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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