Andrew Jackson’s resistance to the Bank

A little history, read as much as you can before you start to get ill.

Ill because this has happened before and the combatants are just as interesting as anything Shakespeare ever dreamed of constructing.

First you must understand Fractional-reserve banking, it is a concept that you must understand to grasp how deep and how old the background to our problems are - a massive fraud that is very, very old. Fractional reserve banking describes the actions of banks lending out more funds than received from deposit accounts, currently the amounts of fractional lending are astronomical. This is part of the reality of "real inflation" that is the increase of money without real value.



Now we can talk about the central banks, in particular I want to review the First and Second Banks of the United States.

A paradise for speculators, the bastard child of Alexander Hamilton. To achieve this an increase of the duty on imported spirits, plus a raise the excise tax on domestically distilled whiskey and other liquors, this was the origin of the Whiskey Rebellion. The Whiskey Rebellion was where Washington was tested and FAILED as a leader shackling us with the curse of Federalism of the Hamiltonian type. Hamiltonian Federalism would later prove to be the seed of that bloody tree that would cause the War of the States.

The Bank aided this boom through its lending, which encouraged speculation in land. This lending allowed almost anyone to borrow money and speculate in land, sometimes doubling or even tripling the prices of land. With such a boom, hardly anyone noticed the widespread fraud occurring at the Bank as well as the economic bubble that had been created.
Sound familiar?

The result was the Panic of 1819

This would lead to the Bank War where two men would fight over the nation's finances, the notorious banker fraudster Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson.

The "Bank War" of 1832–36 was initiated by Biddle when he decided to apply for the Bank's re-charter four years before the charter was scheduled to expire. Until 1832, Jackson, for three years, had ignored the Bank and Biddle. But, once challenged, he decided to veto the bill to re-charter the bank he hated, and Jackson gained great support from the public for his veto.

In early 1833, Jackson decided to pull the government's funds out of the Bank. In response Biddle decided to shrink the money supply and cause a recession in 1834 in order to force Jackson to accept a re-charter bill. The Bank demanded that old loans be repaid and made no new loans.

Biddle had threatened to cause a depression without a re-charter of the bank, and there was a recession in the first half of 1834, but another bill to re-charter failed (partly because Biddle was caught boasting in public that he and the bank would crush the economy) and the Bank was doomed. Its charter expired in April, 1836.

In the spring of 1834, the House voted overwhelmingly against rechartering the Bank. This was followed up by an even higher percentage vote to set up a special committee to investigate whether the Bank had caused the crash.

When the investigating committee arrived at the Bank's door in Philidelphia, armed with a subpoena to examine the books, Biddle refused to give them up, nor would he allow inspection of correspondence with Congressmen, relating to their personal loans and advances he made to them. He also refused to testify before the committee back in Washington.

Biddle would die before all of the charges would ever come to the point to see his worthless carcass punished.