Later this month, the Roberts Reserve Board, one of the most important organs of the US Federal Reserve, marks its centennial, and has been the official US government in the world for over two hundred years.
The question is: What were the traders in the New World (which is the name given to the United States at that time) trading as alternatives to digital currencies for the development of the central bank or the American currency?
In 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Rotherhithe in East London to the world, bringing on board religious dissenters to the government seeking a new life of luxury.
At first, those involved took with them gold and other fine currencies, and they were not satisfied with the effect. Soon the money ran out and they were able to buy food, hides, and other needs from the indigenous people of the American continent.
This difficulty is summarized by Jason Goodwin, author of the book (The Greenback: The Strong Dollar and the Invention of America), saying: “They did not have any money, and they were not wealthy when they arrived. Exchange became an embarrassing matter among the colonists themselves, and it seemed appropriate to barter things, but of course after In a short time, complex exchanges emerged that highlighted the great benefits that money carries.”
The beginning of the idea
Shortly after their arrival, the settlers discovered that certain types of shells were of symbolic importance to many indigenous people, and that they could therefore be exchanged with the English colonists for items such as food.
After exchange between the settlers themselves became very important, the settlers began to use other goods in the barter process. In the northern colonies, they used corn and cod fish, for example, and in many of the southern colonies they preferred tobacco. Many of these commodities have been declared legal money, although some have not been successful as currency.
Jason Goodwin says that the value of tobacco in trade fluctuated based on the success of the crop, adding that another problem that arose with tobacco was that “the leaves were stored and then traded, but of course they crumbled and dried and people sought to barter the more crumbled and drier leaves. And that was It causes a lot of confusion, because in a situation where your currency deteriorates too much it loses its value and that is not a good thing.”
The price of goods differed if paid using hard currency, gold, silver, or coins of some kind, rather than using one of the legal forms of currency such as shells, because hard currency was the most acceptable and therefore the most useful.
However, the early colonists had no alternative options to this advanced form of barter because the British authorities refused to allow the export of gold and silver coins, and also refused to allow the colonists to mint their own coins. It was easier for them to use Spanish coins, which were in circulation in the United States until the early nineteenth century.
Ultimately, the strictness of the British authorities and the tax burden imposed by the British government on the settlers led to a complete break with the British side.
The colonists issued the famous Declaration of Independence in 1776 and succeeded, after a long and bitter war for independence, in defeating the British forces in 1783.
The Revolutionary War, as it was called, left 13 states in financial chaos.
The war was longer than expected and expensive for the colonists. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the Revolution, explains, “Congress issued a large quantity of notes to pay for the clothing, arms, food of the soldiers, and provision of our ships, without paying taxes for three years. They fought and defeated one of the most powerful nations in Europe.”
Defeat of Britain
But with the end of this war, the Continental papers became worthless, and the new republic had to urgently establish an economic and financial system.In 1785, the Continental Council met in New York and issued the dollar on July 6, to be the official currency of the new United States of America.
Congress decided that the system should be decimal, so that the dollar would be equivalent to 100 cents. However, disagreements arose between members of Congress that led to a delay in minting the coin in America until 1792.
Another seventy years passed, in the middle of the Civil War in 1862, when the US Treasury Department was able to print dollar bills in black and green, colors used to prevent counterfeiting of the currency, and from that time the dollar appeared in our world.