GoKawiil🟪 How fake money built America Counterfeiters were the original shadow bankers
How fake money built America
In A Nation of Counterfeiters, Stephen Mihm tells the story of American banking, capitalism, and nation-building through the lens of counterfeit money.
There are lots of surprises.
In the first half of the 19th century, for example, the Midwest was so short of authentic banknotes that people knowingly accepted counterfeit ones. “ This was a region that needed money,” Mihm writes, “and counterfeiters provided it.”
California, by contrast, was comparatively hostile to faked notes. Miners expected to exchange the gold they dug up for notes that were at least partly backed by precious metal. When $100,000 of Bank of Missouri notes were found to be counterfeit, an avenging group of miners chased the counterfeiter all the way to New York.
Counterfeiters avoided the South entirely, likely in fear of the vigilante violence that passed for justice there.
By the 1830s, though, counterfeit bank notes were common across most of the US — and ubiquitous in big cities where the high concentration of banks meant that shopkeepers had little hope of discerning genuine notes from fake ones.
New York State alone had more than 300 banks, each issuing its own notes, each with unique designs, and in arbitrary denominations.
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