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Forum : Quotes : Of all the Civil War legislation -- aside, obviously, from e... 
 Of all the Civil War legislation -- aside, obviously, from emancipation -- this [National Banking Act of February 1863] had the most far-reaching consequences, most of them bad. Although Congress increased the number of national banks in operation (1,650 by December 1865), the destruction of the competitive-money/private-note issue system led to a string of financial upheavals, occurring like clockwork every twenty years until 1913. Competition in money had not only given the United States the most rapidly growing economy in the world, but it had also produced numerous innovations at the state level, the most important of which, branch banking, was prohibited for national banks. Thus, not only did the National Bank and Currency Acts establish a government monopoly over money, but they also excluded the most efficient and stable form of banking yet to emerge (although that mistake would be partially corrected in the 1920s). Critics of Lincoln's big-government policies are on firm ground when they assail the banking policy of the Civil War. Larry Schweikart A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
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