What Is Alexander Hamilton's Financial Plan

Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant from the Caribbean, “a top aide to General George Washington” during the Revolutionary War, and the first ever “Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington.” When he took his position as the Secretary of Treasury, he “inherited a bankrupt nation” with a tremendous war debt and a “shortage of sound currency and bank credit stifled commercial growth.” Hamilton saw the necessity of a solution if the newly formed nation was to prosper. Having already “received a crash course in international commerce as a clerk for a trading firm” in the Caribbean and he “read extensively on economics and finance” , he was proficient at forming a financial plan. He studied the “history of the Bank of North America, chartered by the Continental Congress in 1781” and he also closely studied the Bank of England and its history. At this point, he had already established the Bank of New York. He produced a financial plan to create a national bank in which the government would “assume domestic and foreign debt, pay off federal ward bonds” , he “proposed that the bank issue notes redeemable on demand for specie.” His plan would allow congress to tax the citizens, unlike the Continental Congress. His financial plan proposed that the government would “hold up to one-fifth …show more content…
“It increased the active capital of the country, gave timely aid to the central government in times of financial crises, transferred government funds from one section to another, facilitated the payment of taxes, assisted in foreign exchange operations of the Treasury, and provided a uniform circulating medium.” Although the “bank closed its doors on March 3, 1811” , it set up the framework for banks chartered since then. The ideas in his financial plan are still used to this day and are the basis of America's economy. Without Hamilton's financial plan, our now thriving nation may not have been a nation at