William McKinley, Karl Rove and US Tarrifs
The financial scare, aka the Baring Crisis...
The Baring crisis or the Panic of 1890 was an acute recession. Although less serious than other panics of the era, it is the nineteenth century’s most famous sovereign debt crisis, and the 17th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.
... was precipitated by the near insolvency of Barings Bank in London
was followed by an even worse one in 1893 that led to a four-year economic depression.
It was financial instability much more than tariff policy that made the first half of the 1890s such a fraught economic time, and the tight monetary conditions brought on by a gold-based international monetary system and limited supplies of gold were a chief cause.
This was a central issue in the 1896 campaign, with Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan advocating money backed by more abundant silver and famously declaring that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
McKinley did formally place US money on the gold standard in 1900, but by that time new gold discoveries in the Yukon, Alaska and elsewhere had made the metal less scarce and gold-based monetary policy less restrictive.
Before the Civil War, tariffs made up almost all of US government revenue almost all of the time
Karl Rove, who after years of talking up the former president to anyone who would listen wrote a nearly 500-page book (published in 2015) titled The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters.
Journalist Robert W. Merry continued the McKinley comeback campaign with an acclaimed 2017 biography, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century,
and this year Georgia Tech political scientist Mark Zachary Taylor described McKinley in his book Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times: Explaining Executive Power in the Gilded Age as “one of the most economically successful presidents
Justin Fox Bloomberg 23 June 2024
A rogue trader killed off the two-centuries old Barings merchant bank in the 1990s
- Jag återvände från Singapore 1999, ansvarig för de förluster på 862 miljoner pund som knäckte Storbritanniens äldsta investeringsbank, personligen dömd som ansvarig för 100 miljoner pund, och fick ändå inom loppet av en vecka erbjudande om fem olika kreditkort.
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