DEATH OF A NORTHERN IRISH BANKNOTE

I was disappointed to see that First Trust Bank, a commercial bank based in Northern Ireland, will stop issuing its own brand of banknotes. Under different names, First Trust has been in the business of providing paper money for almost two hundred years, starting with the Provincial Bank of Ireland back in 1825.

99.9% of the world's population uses government-issued banknotes. A small sliver of us-those who live in Northern Island, Scotland, Hong Kong, and Macau-get to use privately-issued banknotes. Prior to First Trust's announcement, I count twelve private issuers scattered across the globe:

Northern Ireland: Bank of Ireland, Danske Bank (formerly Northern Bank), First Trust Bank, and Ulster Bank
Scotland: Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank and The Royal Bank of Scotland
Hong Kong: HSBC, Standard Chartered, Bank of China (Hong Kong)
Macau: Banco Nacional Ultramarino, Bank of China (Macau)

Now there are just eleven.

To our modern sensibilities, privately-issued banknotes seem just strange. But before central banks emerged on the scene, privately-issued banknotes were the norm. Larry White and George Selgin have chronicled how the Scots were particularly adept at this task. Scotland's banking system, which was much more free than the British one, had relatively few bank failures in the 1700 and 1800s compared to the British one, which tried to put limits on banks' ability to issue notes.

In the 1800s this Scottish "free banking" system was imported into my country, Canada, by Scottish immigrants. People might assume that private banknotes were risky instruments, and that's why we needed governments to do the task. But as the chart below shows, between 1868 and 1910 Canadians experienced almost no losses on banknotes.

To read the complete articles, see:
Death of a Northern Irish banknote (https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/02/death-of-northern-irish-banknote.html)
First Trust Bank to cease issuing its own banknotes (https://firsttrustbank.co.uk/banknotes)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web