Second Bank Of The United States
The Second Bank of the United States (BUS) served as the nation's federally authorized central bank during its 20-year charter from February 1817 to January 1836.
A private corporation with public duties, the central bank handled all fiscal transactions for the US Government, and was accountable to Congress and the US Treasury. Twenty percent of its capital was owned by the federal government, the Bank's single largest stockholder Four thousand private investors held 80% of the Bank's capital, including one thousand Europeans. The bulk of the stocks were held by a few hundred wealthy Americans. In its time, the institution was the largest monied corporation in the world.
The essential function of the Bank was to regulate the public credit issued by private banking institutions through the fiscal duties it performed for the US Treasury, and to establish a sound and stable national currency. The federal deposits endowed the BUS with its regulatory capacity.
Modeled on Alexander Hamilton's First Bank of the United States the Second Bank began operations at its main branch in Philadelphia on January 7, 1817, managing twenty-five branch offices nationwide by 1832.
The efforts to renew the Bank's charter put the institution at the center of the general election of 1832, in which BUS president Nicholas Biddle and pro-Bank National Republicans clashed with the "hard-money" Andrew Jackson administration and eastern banking interests in the Bank War. Failing to secure recharter, the Second Bank of the United States became a private corporation in 1836, and underwent liquidation in 1841.
Read more about Second Bank Of The United States: Historical Context and Overview, Terms of Charter, BUS Regulatory Mechanisms, Architecture
Famous quotes containing the words united states, bank, united and/or states:
“United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,—
Nor speak with double tongue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)