William B. Cockran Quotes
Money can never circulate freely and actively unless there be absolute confidence in its value.
William B. Cockran, 1854-1923, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, NY), Speech, Madison Square Garden, New York, August 18, 1896
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time, there was no United States currency. Private banks in some of the states issued their own money. A dollar from Georgia might only be worth 75 cents in New York.
President Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican did not agree with this view as it was he who led America to abandon the gold standard to back its money.
There has always been a fear of inflation and currency debasement by governments. Since ancient times, rulers issued coins and when they were made of cheap metals like copper or iron, the ruler could mint as much as he wanted and when he did so the value went down. By using only precious metals, gold and silver, for coins, there would be a natural restraint on government. Garfield was one of those who believed that we should always have money of gold and silver. The United States would use that principle for the next century even backing its paper money with gold and silver. In the Nixon administration the United States abandoned the gold standard. Today, it is the ability of a country to produce things that maintains value of paper money which has been supplanted in many cases by electronic money.
This is the first major history of banks written in the United States.
FDR was then a candidate for the Democratic Vice Presidential Nomination. This statement shocked some of the conservative French and British delegates and officials such as Ramsay MacDonald, Georges Bonnet, and Neville Chamberlain, but economist John Maynard Keynes strongly approved of Roosevelt Roosevelt’s statements. At issue was whether or not the major currency powers should confer frequently and set the international currency exchange rates or should the rates float and be determined at any point by the free market in currency. FDR held the latter view which was opposed to the positions of the conservative banker-oriented delegates from the European counties, However Roosevelt’s statement was considered “harsh” and “vituperative” by the conservatives and the entire conference collapsed over them. FDR admitted that perhaps he had been too strong and blunt in his language. An irony of this quotation is that 80 years later the positions of liberals and conservatives had both flip-flopped. It became the conservatives who adopted the FDR free market for currency exchange while many liberals called for government intervention and agreement on exchange rates to prevent instability.
William Bourke Cockran, commonly known as Bourke Cockran or Burke Cochran in contemporary reports, was an Irish-American politician and orator. He served as a United States Representative from the East Side of Manhattan for seven terms.
