The bequest of commerce and commercial finance

As Amsterdam's preeminence as a European entrepôt waned in the late seventeenth century, the importance of financing trade grew. An adaptable banking system eased that shift, although credit facilities in the city were independent and often highly individualistic. The Exchange Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609 and administered under the supervision of municipal authorities, emerged as a source of stable media of exchange, a secure depository where payments could be made by book transfers, and a central clearinghouse for international payments. The monopoly over exchange initially given the bank was soon relaxed, permitting the reemergence of private cashiers (kassiers), whose activities had been curtailed in 1609. To Amsterdam's monetary system the bank contributed a unit of account, the bank-money guilder, which traded at a premium (agio) or discount (disagio) against current money. Until the disagio crisis of 1789 the eighteenth-century bank-money premium was usually between 2 and 5 percent. Although the bank was dominant early in the eighteenth century in bank-money transactions, Amsterdam's cashiers, who acted as agents of collection and payment, exchanged bank-and current-money drafts, and issued transferable receipts for clients, controlled the increasingly important field of current-money transactions. Together bank, cashiers, and, by midcentury, bankers specializing in the bill trade formed the Amsterdam clearinghouse of commercial finance.