You are showing a fundamental lack of understanding of any of this.
Shinplasters were NOT National Bank Notes. They were specifically “free bank notes” also known as “wildcat” bank notes. In specific states, particularly Wisconsin and Michigan, “free banks” (named for their charters under free banking laws) saw some shady characters establish branches to redeem their notes “where a wildcat wouldn’t go.” The purpose was to make it impossible to redeem these notes, which also came to be called “shinplasters.” I have never seen a CHARTERED BANK’S notes referred to as “shinplasters,” and certainly not National Bank Notes.
Now, when someone says the “State is flooded with shinplasters and unsecured money,” such wildcat banks were supposedly secured by bonds that they put on deposit with the Secretary of State. However, as the value of the bonds fell (which they often did), the SoS could not sell them for par value and repay noteholders.
THIS IS NOT COUNTERFEITING. This is fraud perpetrated by the bankers themselves.
“You are showing a fundamental lack of understanding of any of this.”
Yeah, well if you actually knew what banknote reporters were doing you might have a point. But since you have ably demonstrated that you don’t, you might want to ponder whether the fundamental lack of understanding is your own.
It doesn’t matter that the first item I posted concerned western shinplasters. The second item involved the Washington County Bank of Rhode Island in the National Bank era, and oddly enough you failed to include that part of the post. Go figure.
But that really doesn’t matter either, because my point in posting the two items was to illustrate what banknote reporters were actually doing versus the nonsense idea that “bank note reporters universally reflected merely the cost of collecting the national banks’ dollars and returning them to their region”.
That’s a simple clearinghouse function that an annual chart could have provided.
Banknote reporters were daily publications, and that should have been your first clue that they were doing something more than reporting clearinghouse costs.
In fact what banknote reporters were doing was “sorting out the good banks and their notes from bad banks and their notes”, in the words of John Thompson, founder of Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter. That quote and a nice little history of it all can be found in the James Grant book I mentioned earlier in the thread. You might want to read it and expand your knowledge.