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:
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don’t try to predict what.”
—Katharine Whitehorn (b. 1926)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)