Central Monetary Services Without Centralization: Stephen Colwell and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century US Monetary Architecture
研究了19世纪美国工业家兼政治经济学家斯蒂芬·科尔韦尔的货币理论，他主张政府发行纸币和建立全国清算所，其思想预示了1913年美联储系统的关键特征，对理解美国经济崛起时期的货币制度设计有参考价值。
Abstract In the 1830s and 1840s, the United States repudiated its national bank and established the so-called Independent Treasury, which dissociated federal fiscal operations from state-chartered banks of issue and seemingly relinquished any federal role in managing the currency. Basic questions about the monetary system's stability, quantitative sufficiency, and geographic scope persisted for the rest of the century and into the next. This article examines the work of Stephen Colwell, an industrialist and political economist, whose Ways and Means of Payment (1859) represents one of the nineteenth century's most comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated works of monetary analysis by an American. Colwell's investigations led him to endorse a government-issued paper money and a national clearinghouse to facilitate domestic trade, with the ultimate aim of promoting national economic development. His recommendations anticipated key features of the Federal Reserve System that was created in 1913. This article reconstructs Colwell's monetary theory in its historical context as a case study of how American political economists and policymakers thought about the relationships between monetary architecture, the state, and economic development in the formative period of American economic ascent.