Reply #20: I take exception here [View All]

the Bank of the US was a hugely corrupt institution run almost exclusivley for the private benefit of Nicholas Biddle and friends, with an absolute stranglehold on the nation's tax money and economic health with little/no public oversight.

You can argue that Jackson's decentalization was flawed and it was, but the notion of a national banking system in a society not run by a monarchy was a very new thing in the history of the world. Jackson's system worked a lot better than anything Biddle and the speculators were doing - it spread risk instead of the whole nation depending on Biddle's loan portfolio. It lasted until Woodrow Wilson's time and the Federal Reserve.

But note the resulting Federal Reserve system was more a pooling of resources that were still spread among many banks, not a revivial of the one supreme central bank idea.