Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/358

. No bank was to receive circulating notes after that time until after it had appointed a redemption agent. In May, 1840, the act was amended so that any person or association who should put in circulation any note not payable on demand, that is any post-note, should be punished by fine and imprisonment, as for a misdemeanor. The section requiring banks to keep twelve and a-half per cent. in specie on the amount of their notes was repealed. Banks were made liable to the inspection and supervision of Bank Commissioners.

In February, 1840, it was reported that there was a great decline in prices at New York and distress for capital. Little business was being done, rents had fallen from thirty per cent. to fifty per cent. Twenty-four establishments at Paterson were idle. During the spring there were still some failures; southern remittances did not come to hand; the banks were strong in specie. In May, the law compelling the country banks to redeem in Albany or New York at one-half of one per cent discount, was going into operation. It produced some difficulty, as the current discount was from one and a-half to two and a-half per cent.

The amount of capital invested by New York and Philadelphia in southern and southwestern banks was estimated at $15 millions, and this was held to account, in some degree, for the embarrassment experienced in those cities in 1840.

The Bank Commissioners of New York pointed out in their report of 1841, that the failure of one large bank might produce a loss so great that the annual income of the safety fund would not pay the interest on the loss. They referred to one bank whose liabilities were $7.6 millions in 1837, and if large federal deposits were again placed in any bank, the same state of things might recur.

January 1, 1841, the safety fund amounted to $914,342. Up to January 1, 1842, the Treasury had advanced for the redemption of the circulating notes of insolvent banks, under the act of 1837, $549,885. On that date the solvent banks were bound to pay in $183,342. The Comptroller construed the act of that the capital of the fund was never to be reduced below one-third of its amount by the redemption of notes in anticipation of the liquidation of the bank's own assets, so that the only amount available was $243,108. Safety fund banks had failed in 1841 with $950,000 in circulation. The capital of the remaining safety fund banks was $30.7 millions, and consequently the annual contribution, $153,507.

The State now borrowed the safety fund, consisting at the time of $343,436, and spent it on the public works.

In March, 1841, there were twenty banks in central and western New York which failed to redeem their notes in Albany or New York, as required by the statute of May 4, 1840.

The decline in State stocks had so impaired the securities deposited