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• #Coinage of silver free

Free silver was especially popular among farmers in the Wheat Belt (the western Midwest) and the Cotton Belt (the Deep South), as well as silver miners in the West. The "free silver" debate pitted the pro-gold financial establishment of the Northeast, along with railroads, factories, and businessmen, who were creditors deriving benefit from deflation and repayment of loans with valuable gold dollars, against farmers who would benefit from higher prices for their crops and an easing of credit burdens. It ranks as the 11th largest decline in U.S. The issue peaked from 1893 to 1896, when the economy was suffering from a severe depression characterized by falling prices ( deflation), high unemployment in industrial areas, and severe distress for farmers.

While all agreed that an expanded money supply would inevitably inflate prices, the issue was whether this inflation would be beneficial or not. Because the actual price ratio of the two metals was substantially higher in favor of gold at the time, most economists warned that the less valuable silver coinage would drive the more valuable gold out of circulation. Supporters of an important place for silver in a bimetallic money system making use of both silver and gold, called " Silverites", sought coinage of silver dollars at a fixed weight ratio of 16-to-1 against dollar coins made of gold. Free silver became increasingly associated with populism, unions, and the fight of ordinary Americans against the bankers and monopolists, and the robber barons of the Gilded Age capitalism era and was referred to as the "People's Money". Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on-demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard. Republican campaign poster of 1896 attacking free silverįree silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th-century.