> Corrupt aristocracy? I’ll let you defend that one — you and Alexander Hamilton, who threw a woman’s honor and good name under the bus to protect his own reputation from charges of defalcation.
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>Correction, he took her honor when he bedded her. He threw her name out on the curb, to be run over by a bus, when the political fur began to fly.
Hm, I hadn’t heard that before. Who was the woman?
I don't recall her name. She was an army officer's wife, and Hamilton put her name in the papers when he began to be questioned closely about his intendency of the public accounts, and he had to explain himself. It's a fairly famous (notorious?) incident.
He opened himself up to those sorts of suspicions, I think, because he was an active gold speculator; he and some associates were very busy in the arbitrage markets, selling gold against silver and vice versa, playing price swings in European markets and buying a lot of the output of the US Mint for delivery to European arbitrageurs.
Hamilton's ring was the main reason the U.S. economy, and particularly frontier areas like Texas, were perpetually cash-starved, leading to rampant land speculation (as land became a medium of exchange). It's also the reason that U.S. coins dated before 1838 are hard to find and trade at a super-premium; so many of them were melted down by Hamilton's European counterparties.
Congress in 1838 altered the monetary standards to suppress the arbitrage trade. It worked. The dollar was reduced in weight and purity, from .77xxx oz. of silver struck at sterling's 92.5% fineness (the old Roman standard for the denarius -- the "penny" of the Bible), down to .75 oz. at 90% (.900 fine), i.e. "coinsilver", which became the New World standard side by side with the old Spanish/Hapsburg/Roman/sterling standard, which continued to be followed by Mexico, Spain, the Austrian Empire, and Great Britain.
Austria invented the "dollar" as the Thaler, named for the Joachimsthal (~"Joachim's Dale") mining district, where silver "cartwheels" began to be struck in the 1400's or 1500's as a convenient high-value coin merchants could carry instead of bags of smaller coin. The Austrian Thaler became the Polish talara and Spanish dolar .... the latter identical with the Mexican dolar peso or "Cap-and-Ray peso". Spanish and Mexican currency circulated freely in the U.S. until the middle of the 19th century and in east Asia into the 20th, where the peso inspired competing "trade dollars" struck by Great Britain, the U.S., and Japan on the heavier standard The last "trade dollars" were demonetized by Great Britain in 1937. Britain also struck numbers of thaler coins from the Austro-Hungarian dies of 1780 during the 1920's for the Middle Eastern trade, after the U.K. debased its own currency after World War I. These coins still show up in American coin shops as bullion coins, minted on the old Joachimsthal standard.
It took 140 years, but Hamilton and his shifty associates and other bankers (but I repeat myself) finally drove out good money with their invisibly-shrinking, constantly-renegotiated substitutes (a.k.a. "bad money").