Paper Money: Let 10,000 Banknotes Bloom

If you are a businessman, how would you like to operate in a country with 10,000 different kinds of banknotes?

Sounds pretty chaotic, doesn't it? How would you know which banknotes were issued by sound banks and which were not?

That's what we had in the United States in 1860. Samuel P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury during the Civil War, brought some order to that system.