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Many of the people who settled in the New World came to escape religious persecution. The Pilgrims, founders of Plymouth, Massachusetts, arrived in 1620.
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Founded in 1694, the Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom. Sometimes known as the ‘Old Lady’ of Threadneedle Street, the Bank’s mission is to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability.
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By December 23, 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, it stood as a classic example of compromise—a decentralized central bank that balanced the competing interests of private banks and populist sentiment.
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First Bank of the United States was needed because the government had a debt from the Revolutionary War, and each state had a different form of currency. It was built while Philadelphia was still the nation's capital.
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The Second Bank of the United States, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was the second federally authorized Hamiltonian National Bank. 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 U.S.
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In this period, only state-chartered banks existed. They could issue bank notes against specie (gold and silver coins) and the states heavily regulated their own reserve requirements, interest rates for loans and deposits, the necessary capital ratio.
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The National Bank Act of 1863 was designed to create a national banking system, float federal war loans, and establish a national currency. Congress passed the act to help resolve the financial crisis that emerged during the early days of the American Civil War.
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Greenbacks were paper currency printed in green on the back, it was issued by the United States during the American Civil War. The colors, ornate designs, unique identification number, signatures and denomination-studded borders were designed to limit counterfeiting, a major weakness of similar bills, called Continentals, issued during the Revolution.
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During the period from 1890–1925, the investment banking industry was highly concentrated and dominated by an oligopoly that consisted of JP Morgan & Co.; Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; Brown Brothers; and Kidder, Peabody & Co.
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Act of Congress that created and established the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States, and granted it the legal authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes and Federal Reserve Bank Notes as legal tender. The Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
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Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury.
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Nixon directed Treasury Secretary Connally to suspend, with certain exceptions, the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, ordering the gold window to be closed such that foreign governments could no longer exchange their dollars for gold.
