Chapter 7

Dutch Bank Finance, 1600–1800

S. Quinn

Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Outline

Coins in the Early Modern Netherlands were a complicated monetary system that could, and did, go wrong in a variety of ways. The basic problem was that people could not be sure how much metal they would receive when paid in coins. This situation is ironic because the economic rationale for coins is sparing people having to figure out what is in a coin. The Bank of Amsterdam, then, was created as a different way to solve the coin problem by getting people to use bank accounts instead.

The difference between a coin and a lump of ...

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