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Colonial Economics and the “Land Bank Schemes”

The land bank tradition was aimed at providing a currency adequate to ordinary trade and improvement, generally alongside some form of government currency. The largely rural population suffered from shortages of currency, thanks to fluctuations in the supply of specie and various sorts of controls on the number of bills circulating which kept economic power in the hands of those with political clout. What the partisans of the land banks proposed was another form of “monetized credit.” […]