Huaxiang Huang and Ryland Thomas.
The financial crisis of 1847 has often been dubbed “The trial of the Bank Charter Act of 1844 (Morgan (1952)). The Act sought to remedy the errors of crises past by trying to prevent the overissue of banknotes that many had felt was the major cause of previous crises in 1825 and 1837. The Act gave the Bank of England an effective monopoly in the issue of new bank notes and those additional notes had to be backed one for one with gold. But this had a crucial unintended consequence: it made it difficult for the Bank to act as a lender of last resort. When the crisis struck, the limits imposed by the Act effectively had to be suspended.