Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Banknote Reporter

Shown is a $5 Series of 1882 brown back proof with an attractive layout from a small bank in Nebraska from which no notes are reported. This is no surprise. The town located 42 miles south-southwest of Lincoln on state Route 103 has a population of a little over 500 today. The bank was in business as a national bank for only 11 months and issued 576 sheets worth of $5 brown backs to support a meager circulation of $11,250. The fact is, the bank had a much longer history in the town, being the successor to two banks; namely, De Witt Bank and Saline County Bank, and after it was liquidated it was reorganized as Dewitt State Bank. Undoubtedly its officers found their national charter to be too restrictive.…

Purpose The purpose of this article is to explain the mechanism in the Aldrich-Vreeland Act that allowed for the creation of additional national bank notes in order to add elasticity to national bank note circulation. The Aldrich-Vreeland Act is the act that authorized the Series of 1882 and 1902 date back national bank notes. Aldrich-Vreeland Act and Elasticity The Aldrich-Vreeland Act, often called the Aldrich-Vreeland Emergency Currency Act, carried the innocuous official title An Act to amend banking laws. It was passed March 30, 1908, in direct response to the ruinous Panic of 1907. That panic, caused by the collapse of a stock market bubble, brought our economy to its knees and reverberated around the world. It resulted in bank failures across the country that swallowed the then uninsured bank…

Two Iraqi bank notes were the top lots at a Noonans auction of global bank notes on Nov. 29-30, 2023. Each of the notes, which both realized far above their pre-auction estimates, were pedigreed to a prominent Iraqi Treasury official. The top bank notes are an Iraq, Government of Iraq 1931 (ND 1941) 100 Fils Specimen graded PMG 25 Very Fine (lot 499), which realized £124,000 (about $156,000), and an Iraq, Government of Iraq 1931 (ND 1944) 50 Fils Specimen graded PMG 35 Choice Very Fine (lot 500) which realized £62,000 (about $78,000). The front of each note depicts a youthful Faisal II, the final monarch of Iraq, who ascended to the throne in 1939 at the age of 3 after his father died in a car accident. These notes…

Typically, the overprinted charter number, seal, and series on Series of 1882 brown backs are a flat brown. This Series of 1882 National from St. Louis that went by in a Heritage auction in 2015 carries an overprint that was printed with what was clearly a rich pink ink. On others, the color grades to a pure pink, which I find unattractive because the impressions often don’t appear crisp and sharp, but rather look bled and sometimes faded. I attribute this to the instability of the pink component in the ink. The pink seals have been found from 5-5-5-5 sheets with Treasury sheet serials in the X, Y, and Z blocks, 10-10-10-20 sheets from the mid-N through entire R blocks, and some 50-100 sheets of the same mid-1896 to early…

Small Size Small Head 1-, 2- and 5-dollar notes are showing some weakness but rare examples are fine. However, there seems to be less interest in the more common notes of this type. 20-, 50- and 100-dollar notes are a bit stronger. Perhaps this is because of inflation lowering the cost of these notes, so to speak. 500- and 1,000-dollar notes continue to be strong in higher grades, but not as red-hot as in the past two years or so. Lower grades for these denominations are down a bit. Nationals remain strong. This is most apparent in Original and 1875 series 2-dollar. 10-, 20-dollar notes, and higher denominations in these series are through the roof. Brown Backs, Date Backs, and Value Backs of the second series also remain strong. As…