New York Clearing House Association

The New York Clearing House Association was the first and largest bank clearing house in the United States. Established before the Civil War, this entity was intended by its founders to systematize and rationalize previously disorganized exchanges and settlements between New York City's banks. These institutions which established the Clearing House became the very heart of American finance in the late nineteenth century as the nation developed a financial system increasingly autonomous from the English and European banks on which Americans had previously depended for credit and capital investment. During the American Civil War, the federal government intervened in a growing financial sector and developed fiscal and monetary policies adequate to the Union's military and industrial needs. In the war's aftermath, New York's banks, and the credit the banks made available, financed a rapid expansion of American industry and transportation infrastructure which made the United States a global economic power and conquered the American West by the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, some of the New York Clearing House's member banks, symbolized in American society, politics, and culture by "Wall Street," came to represent both the awesome power of a robust American financial sector and the greed and irresponsibility which many believed precipitated the disastrous stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The California Gold Rush and an explosion in railroad construction marked the four years before 1853, when the Clearing House was founded. In this same period the number of New York City's banks more than doubled, from 24 to 57. Before the Clearing House, banks had settled their accounts in a laborious manner, employing porters to travel from bank to bank to exchange checks for gold specie. This process became a daily event as the number of banks multiplied. However, the actual reckoning of accounts between banks typically occurred on Fridays in front of a Wall Street bank, in what came to be called the "Porter's Exchange." This practice necessarily led to errors in records and abuse. Several bankers looked to London's Clearing House system as a model for resolving the cumbersome weekly settlement process as others expressed frustration with the current system. In 1831, Albert Gallatin, previously the Secretary of the Treasury for the United States and President of the National Bank of New York, wrote that the lack of a daily exchange of drafts among banks "produces relaxations, favors improper expansions and is attended with serious inconveniences."

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