1. Paper Money in the United States
Examine the Federal Reserve Board of San Franciscos discussion of the history of paper money in the United States at http://www.frbsf.org/publications/federalreserve/annual/1995/history.htmland answer the questions below.

1. What was the first paper money in North American and when was it created?
   
   
2. What backed the Continental currency?
   
   
3. When was the first Bank of the United States established?
   
   
4. What was the free banking era?
   
   
5. What currency was used during the Civil War?
   
   
6. Are todays Federal Reserve notes backed by gold?
   
   

2. Bank Failures and the FDIC
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created during the Great Depression to insure consumers deposits and restore confidence in the banking system. Take the FDICs deposit insurance quiz at http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnspr04/esam.html. How did you do? Banks, like other businesses, sometimes fail due to bad management or unexpectedly bad performance of key industries where a bank has committed many loans. To see the recent experience of failed banks in the United States, visit the FDICs list (http://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/bank/index.html) and answer the following questions:

1. What year are your data from and how many banks failed in that year?
   
   
2. List the states where failures occurred. Do any states seem to have particularly high numbers of failures? Why might that have occurred?
   
   
3. What is the largest deposit size and what bank is this?
   
   
4. What is the smallest deposit size and what bank is this?
   
   
5. Considering that the largest banks in the world have deposits valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, do the failed banks appear to be large or small banks?