Bank of issue
[1]: 10 The short-lived Stockholms Banco (1657-1667) printed notes from 1661 onwards and is generally viewed as the first-ever bank of issue.
[2] In many countries and particularly during the 19th century, several banks were authorized to issue notes that had simultaneous status as legal tender.
[3] The authorization, often referred to as the issuance privilege, was generally granted by the government on a bank-specific basis and for a limited period of time.
Several European countries went through periods during which multiple banks of issue coexisted and had their banknotes simultaneously recognized as legal tender.
The banques départementales were wiped out in the financial crisis associated with the French Revolution of 1848, which resulted in the widening of the Bank of France's note-issuance monopoly to the entire country.
[6]: 16 These were not the only issuers of paper money, however, since most German states (with the only exceptions of Lippe and the Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck) also issued government notes without the intermediation of a bank.
19th-century banks of issue in Europe were most often private-sector entities, albeit typically under hands-on government oversight.
The U.S. is also special in having established a viable system of government-issued paper money with the National Bank Act of 1863, in contrast with most other countries where money directly issued by the government (as opposed to banks of issue) was typically associated with monetary instability, as had been the case with French assignats in the 1790s.
Depending on available communication technologies and on specific situations, the head office of these banks was either in the home country or in the colony itself, occasionally moving in one or the other direction: for example, the seat of the Banque de l'Algérie was relocated from Algiers to Paris in 1900, and that of the Bank of Chōsen from Seoul (then named Keijō) to Tokyo in 1926.
[9] Other banks of issue were established for nominally sovereign countries but under foreign control (in some cases even including headquarters abroad) that was associated with quasi-colonial relations.
Japan's Dai-Ichi Bank played a similar role in the Korean Empire in the years preceding annexation in 1910.
[10] The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, established in 1866 simultaneously in British Hong Kong and the Shanghai International Settlement, combined the features of colonial and quasi-colonial banks of issue, as did the Banque de l'Indochine through its operations in China from 1898 onwards.
In Hong Kong, a system of multiple banks of issue survives, with Bank of China, HSBC and Standard Chartered authorized to issue their own banknotes even though monetary policy is entrusted to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
