1837.Also note this
" Before the establishment of federal deposit insurance, the U.S. experienced periodic banking panics, during which banks suspended specie payments and reduced lending. There was often a corresponding economic slowdown. The Panic of 1837 is considered one of the worst banking panics, and it coincided with a slowdown that lasted for almost five years. The economic disruption was not uniform across the country, however. The slowdown in New England was substantially less severe than
elsewhere. Here we suggest that the Suffolk Bank, a private bank, was one reason for New England’s relative success. We argue that the Suffolk Bank’s provision of note-clearing and lender of last resort services (via the Suffolk Banking System) lessened the effects of the Panic of 1837 in New England relative to the rest of the country, where no bank provided such services. "
(from a paper by Arthur J. Rolnick, Bruce D. Smith, and Warren E. Weber)
And I couldnt leave you without some words form someone you are sworn to burn as a heretic, or sometning; Milton Friedman
"The recent absolutely remarkable phenomenon of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe raises in acute form the issues
that we have been discussing. There is much talk in those countries about moving to a free market, but so far very limited success.
In the past, free markets have developed in all sorts of waysout of feudalism, out of military juntas, out of autocracyand mostly
they have developed by accident rather than by design. It was a pure accident that Hong Kong achieved a free market. Insofar as
anyone designed it, it was the colonial officials who were sent there; but it was a pure accident that they were favorable to, or at
least not hostile to, a free market. It was an accident that a free market developed in the United States, nothing natural about it.
We might very well have gone down a very different road. We started to go down a very different road in the 1830s when there
was widespread governmental activity in the building of canals, in the building of tollways, and the taking over of banksthere were
state banks in Ohio, lilinois, and so on. What happened is that in the Panic of 1837 they all went broke, and that destroyed people's
belief that the way to run a country was by government. That had a great deal to do with the subsequent widespread belief that
small government was the best government."
Sorry SDF, it wasnt private ownership and free trade, it wasnt the evidence you would love it to be.
