continental currency

This nis not a broker report but it does relate to conti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency


Continental currency

A fifty-five dollar Continental issued in 1779.
After the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Continental Congress began issuing paper money known as Continental currency, or Continentals. Continental currency was denominated in dollars from 1/6 of a dollar to $80, including many odd denominations in between. During the Revolution, Congress issued $241,552,780 in Continental currency.[9]
Continental currency depreciated badly during the war, giving rise to the famous phrase "not worth a continental".[10] A primary problem was that monetary policy was not coordinated between Congress and the states, which continued to issue bills of credit.[11] "Some think that the rebel bills depreciated because people lost confidence in them or because they were not backed by tangible assets," writes financial historian Robert E. Wright. "Not so. There were simply too many of them."[12] Congress and the states lacked the will or the means to retire the bills from circulation through taxation or the sale of bonds.[13]
Another problem was that the British successfully waged economic warfare by counterfeiting Continentals on a large scale. Benjamin Franklin later wrote:
The artists they employed performed so well that immense quantities of these counterfeits which issued from the British government in New York, were circulated among the inhabitants of all the states, before the fraud was detected. This operated significantly in depreciating the whole mass....[14]
By the end of 1778, Continentals retained from 1/5 to 1/7 of their face value. By 1780, the bills were worth 1/40th of face value. Congress attempted to reform the currency by removing the old bills from circulation and issuing new ones, without success. By May 1781, Continentals had become so worthless that they ceased to circulate as money. Franklin noted that the depreciation of the currency had, in effect, acted as a tax to pay for the war.[15] In the 1790s, after the ratification of the United States Constitution, Continentals could be exchanged for treasury bonds at 1% of face value.[16] Continental bills are now very rare, and are sought after by collectors.
After the collapse of Continental currency, Congress appointed Robert Morris to be Superintendent of Finance of the United States. Morris advocated the creation of the first financial institution chartered by the United States, the Bank of North America, in 1782. The bank was funded in part by specie loaned to the United States by France. Morris helped finance the final stages of the war by issuing notes in his name, backed by his own money. The Bank of North America also issued notes convertible into specie.[17]
The painful experience of the runaway inflation and collapse of the Continental dollar prompted[citation needed] the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to include the gold and silver clause into the United States Constitution so that the individual states could not issue bills of credit, or "make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts."[18] This restriction only applies to the states: the federal government has the right to issue other forms of currency.