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The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins. Speculative lending practices in western states, a sharp decline in cotton prices, a collapsing land bubble, international specie flows, and restrictive lending policies in Great Britain were all to blame. On May 10, 1837, banks in New York City suspended specie payments, meaning that they would no longer redeem commercial paper in specie at full face value. Despite a brief recovery in 1838, the recession persisted for approximately seven years. Banks collapsed, businesses failed, prices declined, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. Unemployment may have been as high as 25% in some locales. The years 1837 to 1844 were, generally speaking, years of deflation in wages and prices.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.measuringworth.com )〕 ==Causes== The crisis followed a period of economic expansion from mid-1834 to mid-1836. The prices of land, cotton, and slaves rose sharply in these years. The origins of this boom had many causes, both domestic and international. Because of the peculiar factors (Specie Circular) of international trade at the time, abundant amounts of silver were coming into the United States from Mexico and China. Land sales and tariffs on imports were also generating substantial federal revenues. Through lucrative cotton exports and the marketing of state-backed bonds in British money markets, the United States acquired significant capital investment from Great Britain. These bonds financed transportation projects in the United States. British loans, made available through Anglo-American banking houses like Baring Brothers, fueled much of the United States's westward expansion, infrastructure improvements, industrial expansion, and economic development during the antebellum era. In 1836, directors of the Bank of England noticed that the Bank's monetary reserves had declined precipitously in recent years, possibly because of poor wheat harvests that forced Great Britain to import much of its food (there was probably a major world climatic event in 1835, see "Ice-Core-Based Volcanic Atmospheric Injection and Loading for the Past 1500 Years" http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/IVI2/#Version2) . To compensate, the directors indicated that they would gradually raise interest rates from 3 to 5 percent. Conventional financial theory held that banks should raise interest rates and curb lending when faced with low monetary reserves. Raising interest rates, according to the laws of supply and demand, was supposed to attract specie since money generally flows where it will generate the greatest return (assuming equal risk amongst possible investments). In the open economy of the 1830s, characterized by free trade and relatively weak trade barriers, the monetary policies of the hegemonic power – in this case, Great Britain – were transmitted to the rest of the interconnected global economic system, included the U.S. The result was that as the Bank of England raised interest rates, major banks in the United States were forced to do the same. When New York banks raised interest rates and scaled back on lending, the effects were damaging. Since the price of a bond bears an inverse relationship to the yield (or interest rate), the increase in prevailing interest rates would have forced down the price of American securities. Importantly, demand for cotton plummeted. The price of cotton fell by 25% in February and March 1837. The United States economy, especially in the southern states, was heavily dependent on stable cotton prices. Receipts from cotton sales provided funding for some schools, balanced the nation's trade deficit, fortified the US dollar, and procured foreign exchange earnings in British pound sterling, the world's reserve currency at the time. Since the United States was still a predominantly agricultural economy centered on the export of staple crops and an incipient manufacturing sector, a collapse in cotton prices would have caused massive reverberations. Within the United States, there were several contributing factors. In July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States (BUS), the nation's central bank and fiscal agent. As the BUS wound up its operations in the next four years, state-chartered banks in the West and South relaxed their lending standards, maintaining unsafe reserve ratios.〔 Two domestic policies, in particular, exacerbated an already volatile situation. The Specie Circular of 1836 mandated that western lands could be purchased only with gold and silver coin. The circular was an executive order issued by Andrew Jackson, and favored by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and other hard-money advocates. The intent was to curb speculation in public lands, but the circular set off a real estate and commodity price crash as most buyers were unable to come up with sufficient hard money or "specie" (gold or silver coins) to pay for the land. Secondly, the Deposit and Distribution Act of 1836 placed federal revenues in various local banks (derisively termed "pet banks") across the country. Many of these banks were located in western regions. The effect of these two policies was to transfer specie away from the nation's main commercial centers on the East Coast. With lower monetary reserves in their vaults, major banks and financial institutions on the East Coast had to scale back their loans, which was a major cause of the panic along with the real estate crash. Americans at the time attributed the cause of the panic principally to domestic political conflicts. Some blamed the policies of President Andrew Jackson who refused to renew the charter of Second Bank of the United States, resulting in the withdrawal of government funds from the bank. Martin Van Buren, who became president in March 1837, was largely blamed for the panic even though his inauguration preceded the panic by only five weeks. Van Buren's refusal to use government intervention to address the crisis (such as emergency relief and increasing spending on public infrastructure projects to reduce unemployment) according to his opponents, contributed further to the hardship and duration of the depression that followed the panic. Jacksonian Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the national Bank, both in funding rampant speculation and in introducing inflationary paper money. This was caused by banks issuing paper money excessively. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Panic of 1837」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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