If you look back at early corporations in America, a lot of them were banks. Banks are a type of corporation and they're an important type of corporation because they actually fund other corporations. So they're in a way, a meta corporation. They actually can cause other corporations to come into existence by providing them with loans and money. The question is who can make banks? And this was a big struggle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists in the early days of our Republic. The Federalists wanted there to be a strong central bank and that central bank would have the ability to raise funds for the army and do other things for the nation. The Anti-Federalists, who were typically from the rural South and had some skepticism about those monied interests in the North, had a whole campaign over several periods. The first, and then the second national bank of America was formed by Federalists and then destroyed by Anti-Federalists. In the wake of the destruction of the second national bank, the country saw a great need for more banking. And a lot of states filled that void by allowing private individuals to form banks in the state. Not national banks, but state banks. And there was this period known as the free banking era where many states passed laws that said anyone can form a banking corporation in the state, provided some minimal set of requirements, as opposed to having to prove to Congress that it was needed or to go through hearings or what have you. And of course, the result was an explosion in the number of private banks existing in states. And these banks began issuing their own currency known as Wildcat Currency. Some of them would say things on them that are actually kind of funny, in retrospect. Like it would be a $5 bank note and you could take it to the Cleveland bank and exchange it for either $5 or $5 in cords of wood or $5 in coonskin caps. The problem with these private bank notes was that they weren't very regulated, which isn't inherently a problem, but it became a problem when the government got itself into several other economic crises. And as the money supply began to dry up, and people went to banks to demand a return on their bank note and banks didn't have enough cash on hand to pay out the notes. People got more anxious. Bank runs began to proliferate. Entire banks went bankrupt and it turned out those banks had lent to other banks. And the whole thing was a mix, a mess of an interconnected system. And one bank went down, took down another one. It's a lot like what happened by the way, in the 2007-'08 mortgage crisis, where we had these toxic assets that were interconnected. It’s just a reminder that history repeats. But this free banking era ended in a crisis where these free banks turned out to be unsustainable, or at least, the regulatory response to a crisis is usually to change whatever was perceived to cause the crisis. And at that point, the crisis was blamed on free banking. So the free banking laws were rescinded and a national bank, the US Treasury, was established around 1860.