In a recent NBER paper, Cutsail and Grubb argue that North Carolina's colonial bills of credit were valued like discount bonds, with a current market value largely determined by the discounted value of the bills when paid into the treasury in taxes or other public payments. Grubb has previously...

This is an unpublished comment on a Perkin's paper that surveyed banking in colonial America. It argues that historians have overlooked a number of abortive banking schemes in the colonies, implying that the absence of banks was not an "entrepreneurial failure." and that the extension of the...

Farley Grubb has recently published a series of papers addressing the monetary and financial history of colonial New Jersey. These papers purport that the best way to explain the value of colonial currencies in general, and New Jersey’s colonial currency in particular, is to consider them...

If they could be believed, Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to scholarship and public policy. This paper shows, however, that Grubb's papers should not be believed. Grubb's key assumption, that the medium of exchange can be...

Although ingenious, Farley Grubb's (2004) recent money supply estimates for colonial Pennsylvania are too inaccurate to be of use to scholars. "Pounds" in runaway advertisements do not invariably refer to Pennsylvania's bills of credit, as Grubb asserts, but to her unit of account money....