3 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsThat's due to the fractional reserve structure of banks. They're unstable and reliant on each other by design, more closely than companies in most other industries.
Their wordsAnother way of putting it is that a collection of dozens of solvent well-run banks can still be broken as a group if they become greatly overleveraged compared to how many depositors want their money back at once.
Their wordsThere were booms and busts, and cumulative price inflation was zero, and the United States went from a new-world emerging backwater in the late 1700s to being the world's largest economy by the late 1800s.