When the Forgotten Founders series wrapped, a reader asked the right question: do these old stories actually connect to anything modern, or are they just costume drama with a moral?
Fair challenge. Here's the answer, with citations on both ends of every comparison: the connections aren't metaphors. The founding generation's financial disasters and rescues ran on specific mechanisms, manufactured credit, confidence backstops, distance-sold assets, mismatched durations, and those mechanisms are not historical. They are the operating system. The fonts improved; the physics didn't.
And you don't have to take a blogger's word for the strongest of these links, because the referee has already ruled. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's own economists published a study of the Panic of 1792 in their Liberty Street Economics series, and its title does my thesis's work for me: "Central Bank Crisis Management during Wall Street's First Crash." When the institution that runs modern crisis response writes up a 1792 episode as its own origin story, the crosswalk between the founders' ledgers and this morning's headlines stops being a stylistic choice. Below, nine pairings, each one an old post from this series set against a documented modern event, ending with literally today's wire and the biggest machine question since the one Tench Coxe drafted an answer to in 1791. Check both halves of every pairing yourself; the citations are at the bottom.
1. The corner and the exchange: Duer 1792, FTX 2022
The setup, then, in the New York Fed's words: "In late 1791, a former Treasury Department assistant and later speculator and businessman William Duer conspired to corner U.S. securities. Duer and his co-conspirators borrowed heavily to do so." The borrowing ran through mutual endorsements, a closed circle of partners guaranteeing each other's notes, and when prices turned, the Fed's account continues, "because Duer was long U.S. securities, he was unable to pay his debts. By early March, Duer defaulted." Securities fell more than 20 percent in weeks. Within about two of them, the Treasury's first insider was in debtors' prison, where he died.
The setup, now: when FTX collapsed in November 2022, the Wall Street Journal's reporting, as summarized in the consolidated account, found that Alameda Research owed FTX about $10 billion, secured through customer funds, at a moment when FTX held $16 billion in customer assets, with roughly $8 billion ultimately missing. An exchange and its house trading firm, two hands of one operator, each propping up the other's balance sheet: mutual endorsement, rediscovered with tokens. The unwind ran on Duer's clock too. Withdrawal run to bankruptcy took four days in November 2022; a jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on all seven counts, wire fraud and conspiracies including securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering, in November 2023, and he received 25 years and an $11.02 billion forfeiture order in March 2024. Duer's insider pedigree even has its twin: the lawsuit over his old Treasury Board accounts landed the same day as his default, the past and present arriving together, which students of the FTX timeline will recognize.
Even the aftermaths connect, and here the Fed's historians state outright what I once only implied: the crisis coordination "ultimately led to a May 1792 meeting of twenty-four broker-dealers under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, who signed an agreement of cooperation, an act many historians view as the origin of the New York Stock Exchange." Markets write themselves rules because one participant had none. The rulebook being drafted around crypto markets since 2022 is the same reflex, still mid-sentence.
2. The rescue reflex: Hamilton 1792, the SVB weekend 2023
Now watch what the other side of the 1792 story became, because this is the pairing where the modern institution has already claimed its ancestor. The New York Fed's account: "By mid-March, in coordination with the Bank of New York, Hamilton began a series of lender-of-last-resort operations in the Treasury market, authorizing open market purchases of securities at a penalty rate of 7 percent, but against all good collateral." Lend freely, at a penalty rate, against good collateral: if that formula sounds familiar, the Fed's economists say why: "key features of Hamilton's market intervention predate Walter Bagehot's famous rules for central bank crisis management by nearly a century." Bagehot's Lombard Street is the sacred text of modern central banking. Hamilton was running it, per the Fed itself, eighty years early, cleaning up after Duer. And the result, in their words: "The Panic of 1792 appears to have been effectively managed with little or no long-term spillover to the economy."
Now read the joint statement Treasury Secretary Yellen, Fed Chair Powell, and FDIC Chair Gruenberg issued on Sunday, March 12, 2023, as Silicon Valley Bank failed: "Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13." Signature Bank's depositors would likewise "be made whole," no losses "borne by the taxpayer," shareholders not protected, and the Federal Reserve announced additional funding for eligible institutions the same day. Strip the letterhead and it's the same play: move on the weekend, backstop against good assets, publish terms big and clear enough to change psychology before Monday opens. It worked in five weeks in 1792 and in roughly one news cycle in 2023, and the officials executing the 2023 version belong to the institution whose own historians traced the play to Hamilton. The founders' ledgers aren't a metaphor for modern crisis management. They're its documentation.
3. The land bubble with a mortgage: 1797, 2008
The largest financial event of the modern era has the oldest ancestor in this series. In the 1790s, the smartest men in America bought land with borrowed money on the theory that it always goes up: Robert Morris optioned 6 million acres against a European loan that never funded; James Wilson, per Mount Vernon's researchers, owed hundreds of thousands in land debt and kept buying despite his insolvency. The Panic of 1797 called every note at once, and the two men who had done most to design America's government finished in debtors' prison and in flight from creditors, respectively.
Two hundred eleven years later, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission spent eighteen months investigating 2008 and opened its conclusions with a sentence that could sit as the epigraph over Prune Street prison: "The Commission concluded that this crisis was avoidable." Among its findings: "excessive borrowing and risk-taking by households and Wall Street," collapsing lending standards, and regulators unprepared for the unwind. Swap "households and Wall Street" for "signers and land companies" and the report reads as a finding on 1797. The instrument evolved from land warrants to mortgage-backed securities; the physics, buying an illiquid asset with short obligations on the assumption that refinancing always arrives, did not move an inch. Even the era's one winner has his modern echo: William Bingham bought his two million acres with banked cash and died rich, the 18th-century version of the buyer who entered 2008 without a mortgage they couldn't carry.
Avoidable, both times, by the same discipline. That's not a coincidence of adjectives; it's a diagnosis with a 230-year chart.
4. Not worth a Continental: 1781, 2022
The Treasury's own history records the founding currency disaster in two numbers: $241.5 million of Continental paper issued, collapsing by May 1781 at 500 to 1,000 against hard money, while Americans coined the phrase "not worth a Continental." Michael Hillegas kept the ledger through all of it.
The modern echo is milder in magnitude and identical in mechanism. U.S. consumer inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in the year through June 2022, by the consolidated account "a record not seen since 1981," before subsiding over the following two years. Nobody's dollar died at 500 to 1. But the transfer ran the same direction it ran in 1781: holders of paper claims, wages, fixed receivables, cash savings, absorbed the loss, while holders of assets rode through, which is the entire thesis my book The W-2 Trap takes from this history. Every generation that watches its money soften rediscovers Hillegas's job: counting honestly while the unit of counting shrinks.
5. Scioto at scale: 1789, the $12.5 billion year
The Scioto Company sold French families roughly 150,000 acres of Ohio the company didn't own, from a Paris office fronted by a famous poet, to buyers who couldn't inspect the land and learned the truth on the dock in 1791.
The Federal Trade Commission's data for 2024: consumers reported losing more than $12.5 billion to fraud, up 25 percent in a year. The largest category was investment scams at $5.7 billion, itself up 24 percent. The share of fraud reporters who actually lost money jumped from 27 percent to 38 percent, and consumers reported losing more to scams paid by bank transfer or cryptocurrency than all other payment methods combined. Every Scioto mechanism is present in the modern file: the asset sold at maximum distance from the buyer (renderings, token dashboards, "turnkey" listings three time zones away), the respectable face at the door, the urgency of buyers who feel history closing in on them, and remediation that arrives, when it arrives, years late and partial. The five checks in the Scioto post were written for 1789 and work unmodified on anything in the FTC's top categories.
6. The carrying-cost economy: Wilson's warrants, your subscriptions
James Wilson's land warrants billed him maintenance payments; Henry Knox's estate billed him a lifestyle; both men were destroyed not by falling prices but by obligations that arrived on a calendar they didn't control. The modern household runs a miniature of the same structure: the mortgage that resets, the assessment that arrives certified, the subscription stack that renews silently, the financed everything. Against that standing drain, the Federal Reserve's 2024 household survey found only 63 percent of adults could cover a $400 emergency expense entirely with cash or its equivalent. A third of the country is one Wilson-style calendar event from borrowing at the worst moment. The founding lesson prices in one sentence: whatever can demand money from you on schedule is a creditor, whatever costume it wears.
7. The custodian shortage: their monuments, our feeds
The series' strangest finding was who got remembered. The ruined got the fresco, the Chicago bronze, the presidential reburial; the solvent, Willing, Clymer, Gallatin, got obscurity. Our attention economy kept the bias and added a recommendation engine: the spectacular combustions get the documentaries and the discourse, the custodians get nothing, and the ambient financial content a young saver actually sees is overwhelmingly Morris-shaped, conviction, concentration, borrowed courage, rather than Willing-shaped. The Fed's same 2024 survey shows the result of a culture that teaches heroics instead of custody: 35 percent of non-retirees believe their retirement savings are on track, and 73 percent of adults report doing at least okay financially, down from 78 percent in 2021. The custodian playbook, boring contributions, matched durations, no personal guarantees, documents executed, has been fully public since the 1790s. It just doesn't trend.
8. The machine question: the Report on Manufactures 1791, the AI Index 2025
Every era gets one technology argument big enough to reorganize the economy, and the founding's version has a paper trail running straight through this series. In 1791, Hamilton's Report on Manufactures argued that the farm republic should embrace the machine economy, and the working draft plus the statistics underneath it came from Tench Coxe, who had already made the first attempt to bring Richard Arkwright's spinning machinery, Britain's guarded industrial crown jewel, across the Atlantic, and who preached the cotton economy before the gin existed. The debate was recognizably ours: would the machines hollow out existing work or multiply the country's output, and should a government push them or fear them?
The modern ledger entry comes from Stanford's AI Index. Its 2025 report records that 78 percent of surveyed organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55 percent the year before; that U.S. private AI investment reached $109.1 billion in 2024, with generative AI investment at $33.9 billion globally, up 18.7 percent; and that the cost of running a fixed level of model capability fell more than 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024. Set the two eras side by side and the contrasts are real: Coxe's machine revolution mechanized muscle and took a generation to cross an ocean (his own Arkwright attempt failed; the industry he was named father of arrived after him), while this one mechanizes slices of desk work and moved from 55 to 78 percent adoption in a single measured year, its unit costs collapsing faster than any technology the founders could have conceived.
The export-control chapter repeated this month, nearly verbatim. In the 1780s, Britain treated Arkwright's machinery as a strategic asset and fenced it by law; Coxe's attempt to import it failed against exactly that fence. On June 26, 2026, my Apprised intel desk led with this headline: "U.S. Invokes National Security to Freeze Anthropic's Top AI Models for Foreign Nationals." Swap the spinning frame for the frontier model and it's the same state reflex, 240 years on: when a general-purpose technology starts deciding national outcomes, governments stop treating it as a product and start treating it as a border.
But the deeper reading is what stays constant, and it's two things. First, both revolutions were governed through statistics: the founding era's machine policy ran on Coxe's compiled data, and ours runs on indexes like Stanford's, which makes the numbers man of 1791 the direct ancestor of every AI-adoption chart in your feed. Second, and this is the series' whole point wearing new clothes: the technology being real has never exempted anyone from the ledger laws. The 1790s men were ruined amid a genuine industrial dawn; the boom Coxe predicted arrived, and Morris, Wilson, and Duer still died broke inside it, because credit physics doesn't care whether the underlying revolution is authentic. Coxe himself showed the solvent version: unlevered, patient exposure to the real transformation (those coal lands paid his grandchildren). For anyone deciding how to position for AI, the founding-era result is unambiguous: being right about the machine is not a strategy; surviving to its payoff is, and survival is a structure question answered by the same seven laws as always. That claim earned its own article: The Seven Ledger Laws in the AI Era runs each law through the AI transition, law by law, with the same citations.
9. Today's wire, same ledger: July 3, 2026
One more test, the strictest available: does the crosswalk hold against literally today's news? Disclosure first: I run two newsroom projects, Apprised and Corvus, which aggregate official government and market feeds, so the items below come off my own wire this morning and every one originates at a .gov source you can check directly.
On today's Apprised Government Wire: the State Department announced "U.S. Participation in the Inaugural Regional Security Conference in Martinique." Readers of this series know Martinique: it's the island where a 24-year-old William Bingham ran the Continental Congress's covert supply and privateering operation from 1776, taking a share of every British prize. Two hundred fifty years later, the same island sits in the same department's wire as a security partner. The War Department's wire carries "Contracts for July 2, 2026," the daily procurement list, which is Henry Knox's department and George Clymer's supply-committee work matured into a permanent government page. The GAO published a June 30 comment letter on the accounting profession's auditing standards, which is Oliver Wolcott's career, the republic run by auditors arguing about standards, institutionalized. And the Congressional Budget Office posted a cost estimate for H.R. 5999, which is the mature descendant of Albert Gallatin's accountability machinery, his 1801 annual-report law and Ways and Means committee grown into a permanent office that prices every bill. Four items, one morning, four offices this series watched get invented.
And the numbers of the day, from official BLS and FRED series snapshotted by my Corvus pipeline this morning: headline CPI up 4.25 percent year over year as of May 2026 with core at 2.82 percent, unemployment at 4.2 percent for June, average hourly earnings up 3.52 percent year over year, the 10-year-minus-2-year Treasury spread at a positive 0.35 percentage points, and initial jobless claims at 215,000. Read the middle two together: with headline prices rising 4.25 percent and wages rising 3.52 percent, the real value of a paycheck is shrinking again this year, which means the transfer Michael Hillegas watched at 500 to 1 in 1781 is running right now at 2026 magnitude, quietly, in the gap between two official series. If you want to explore the underlying housing and income layers yourself, my data project HomeStats publishes browsable FHFA house-price and IRS income series for exactly this kind of checking.
Widen from today to the last two weeks of the archive and the rhymes get louder. The intel desk's June ran on the Strait of Hormuz: "Iran Declares Strait of Hormuz Closed" (June 20), "IMO Evacuates 11,000+ Sailors from Persian Gulf" (June 23), a tanker hit in the strait (June 27), and oil still moving on every headline since, including today's WTI up 2.2 percent. This series has a name for that: the chokepoint tax, the oldest line item in American commerce. Robert Morris lost over 150 ships to contested sea lanes and called himself "about even" only because privateering paid; Bingham's fortune was literally a percentage of the chokepoint (a share of every British prize taken off Martinique); Girard's fleet made its margins running exactly this kind of water. When tankers reprice through a contested strait, the founders' shipping ledgers are the reference data.
The markets desk, meanwhile, spent June running a controlled replay of 1792. Its headlines this fortnight: bitcoin 28 percent off its peak amid what the desk called "crypto carnage," $25.8 billion of weekly equity outflows, an AI-stock selloff, and then, on July 1, "Strongest U.S. equity H1 in 5 years; crypto craters." Hold those two clauses together: a crowded, levered asset class unwinding 28 percent while the broad economy's market prints its best half in five years. That's the exact anatomy the New York Fed described in 1792, a violent unwind in the speculated asset with "little or no long-term spillover to the economy," the Duer pattern decoupling from Main Street in real time. And the July 2 brief put the Hillegas thread in market language: "negative real rates," the desk wrote, driving a dollar bid, which is the same fact as wages at 3.52 against prices at 4.25, seen from a trading screen instead of a paycheck.
One more from the archive, and it may be the deepest rhyme of the month: on June 29 the intel desk led with "Supreme Court Blocks Trump from Firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook." Whatever your politics, recognize the question under the case, because this series watched it get asked the first three times: who may touch the central bank? It was asked in 1791 when Willing's First Bank was chartered over fierce objection, in 1811 when Congress killed that bank and Gallatin, "foreseeing financial disaster," was proven right by the War of 1812, and in 1816 when the Second Bank arrived as the institutional apology. The independence of the money power from the political power is not a modern controversy with historical footnotes; it's a founding-era controversy that has never once closed, and this month it was on the Supreme Court's docket.
That's the crosswalk passing its hardest test: not curated history rhyming with curated news, but a random Thursday's official wire plus two ordinary weeks of the archive, and most of this series' cast walks straight out of them.
10. The skill under all of it: verification
One more modern connection, and it's the one this series practiced rather than preached. Across six waves, the research killed a string of confident, viral, uncited claims: the four-document version of Robert Morris's signing record, Salomon's legendary $650,000, Meredith's unrepaid $100,000, a spurious John Adams quote. Each was plausible, flattering to its story, and unsupported by any checkable source, which is precisely the profile of most financial misinformation in your feed right now. The Scioto families bought deeds they couldn't verify from sellers they couldn't see. The modern equivalent is repeating a number because it arrived confidently formatted. Same distance, same lying, and the same defense: check the chain of title on every claim before you build on it.
This article held itself to that rule on both centuries. Where the primary door was open, official releases from the Fed, the FTC, and the FCIC, the quotes are verbatim from the source. Where official sites block automated readers (the SEC rate-limits, the Bureau of Labor Statistics refuses bots), the facts are taken from consolidated accounts and labeled as exactly that in the notes below. Sourcing honesty is not a footnote habit; it's the whole difference between history and content.
How to use the crosswalk
Read any story in the series and name the mechanism instead of the man: manufactured credit, confidence backstop, distance-sold asset, calendar obligation, unpriced generosity, missing structure. Then find that mechanism in the present tense, in the news or, more usefully, in your own ledger. The founders' lives stop being costume drama the moment you realize the same seven or eight machines have been running continuously since Prune Street held its most famous prisoner, and that every one of them is either working for you or on you, today, by structure and not by luck.
The bag of gold in the Capitol dome fresco changes hands every generation. The hands are new each time. The grip never is.
Related reading
- The Ledger Lessons: 15 Founding Fortunes and What They Teach About Money in 2026: the series capstone this article extends.
- William Duer: The Founding Father Who Crashed an American Market First: the full 1792 file.
- Robert Morris: The Founding Father in the Capitol Dome Nobody Can Name: the 1797 half of the 2008 pairing.
- The Richest American Died in 1831. His Money Is Still Following Orders.: the structure lesson, applied to modern estate planning.
Fact-check notes and sources
- The Panic of 1792 as proto-central banking (Duer "conspired to corner U.S. securities... borrowed heavily," the default, Hamilton's "lender-of-last-resort operations... at a penalty rate of 7 percent, but against all good collateral," the judgment that "key features of Hamilton's market intervention predate Walter Bagehot's famous rules for central bank crisis management by nearly a century," the "little or no long-term spillover" outcome, and the crisis coordination leading to the buttonwood-tree meeting of twenty-four broker-dealers "many historians view as the origin of the New York Stock Exchange"): Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics, "Crisis Chronicles: Central Bank Crisis Management during Wall Street's First Crash (1792)," Narron and Skeie, May 9, 2014. Dollar figures for Hamilton's purchases ($100,000 authorized March 26, $150,000 via the Bank of New York, the up-to-$500,000 pledge) are sourced in the Duer article from the consolidated account of the panic.
- The March 12, 2023 joint statement (quoted verbatim: depositor access "starting Monday, March 13," Signature depositors "made whole," no losses "borne by the taxpayer," shareholder non-protection, the additional Fed funding announcement): Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Joint Statement by Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC, March 12, 2023.
- The 2008 findings ("The Commission concluded that this crisis was avoidable"; "excessive borrowing and risk-taking by households and Wall Street"; regulatory breakdowns): Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Final Report conclusions (January 2011), hosted by Stanford Law School.
- FTX and Bankman-Fried (the November 2022 collapse timeline, Alameda owing FTX about $10 billion secured through customer funds against $16 billion of customer assets per Wall Street Journal reporting, roughly $8 billion missing, conviction on all seven counts November 2, 2023, the 25-year sentence and $11.02 billion forfeiture of March 28, 2024): Wikipedia, "Samuel Bankman-Fried", attributed as the consolidated account of court-documented events; SEC.gov rate-limits automated access, so its releases are not quoted directly.
- Inflation peak (9.1 percent in June 2022, "a record not seen since 1981," and the subsequent decline): Wikipedia, "2021-2023 inflation surge", attributed; the underlying figure is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI release, whose site blocks automated retrieval and so is cited here at one remove.
- Fraud statistics ($12.5 billion reported lost in 2024, up 25 percent; investment scams at $5.7 billion, up 24 percent; the 27 to 38 percent jump in reporters losing money; bank transfer and cryptocurrency losses exceeding all other payment methods combined; 2.6 million reports): Federal Trade Commission, "New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024," March 10, 2025.
- Household finance statistics (63 percent covering a $400 expense with cash or equivalent, 35 percent of non-retirees on track for retirement, 73 percent doing at least okay, down from 78 percent in 2021, all for 2024): Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households (SHED), report on 2024, executive summary.
- AI adoption and investment statistics (78 percent of organizations using AI in 2024, up from 55 percent; $109.1 billion of U.S. private AI investment in 2024; $33.9 billion global generative AI investment, up 18.7 percent; the more-than-280-fold inference cost decline between November 2022 and October 2024): Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute, AI Index Report 2025. The 1791 half of that pairing (Coxe's draft and statistics for the Report on Manufactures, the Arkwright attempt, the cotton advocacy, the coal lands) is cited in the Coxe article, including the draft preserved at the National Archives' Founders Online.
- Today's wire items (the State Department's Martinique security-conference item, the War Department's "Contracts for July 2, 2026," the GAO's June 30, 2026 comment letter on AICPA auditing standards, and the CBO cost estimate for H.R. 5999): retrieved July 3, 2026 from the Apprised Government Wire, my own aggregator of official government feeds; each item originates at its listed .gov source (state.gov, war.gov, gao.gov, cbo.gov) and headline titles are reproduced as published. Disclosure: Apprised, Corvus, and HomeStats are my projects.
- Today's economic numbers (headline CPI up 4.25 percent year over year and core up 2.82 percent as of May 2026, unemployment 4.2 percent for June 2026, average hourly earnings up 3.52 percent year over year, the 10-year-minus-2-year spread at positive 0.35 percentage points, initial claims of 215,000 for the week ending June 27, 2026): official Bureau of Labor Statistics and FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) series, snapshotted July 3, 2026 by my Corvus data pipeline at its public /api/bls and /api/fred endpoints; the real-wage observation is arithmetic on the two cited series. Housing and income layers (FHFA house-price and IRS income series) are browsable at HomeStats.
- Recent archive headlines (the June 26 "U.S. Invokes National Security to Freeze Anthropic's Top AI Models for Foreign Nationals" item, the Hormuz sequence including "Iran Declares Strait of Hormuz Closed" June 20 and "IMO Evacuates 11,000+ Sailors from Persian Gulf" June 23 and the June 27 tanker strike, the June 29 "Supreme Court Blocks Trump from Firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook" item, and the markets-desk lines: bitcoin 28 percent off peak June 30, "crypto carnage," $25.8 billion weekly equity outflows June 29, "Strongest U.S. equity H1 in 5 years; crypto craters" July 1, and "negative real rates" July 2): Apprised daily brief archive, intel and markets desks, retrieved July 3, 2026, headlines reproduced verbatim; the briefs cite their underlying wire sources per item. Same first-party disclosure as above: Apprised is my project. Characterizations of what these events mean (the chokepoint tax, the 1792 decoupling, the bank-independence continuity) are this article's interpretation of the cited items, offered without partisan judgment.
- Historical claims: each is documented in its linked series post, which carries per-claim citations to the underlying sources (DSDI, the American Battlefield Trust, the Architect of the Capitol, Mount Vernon, the U.S. Treasury's history pages, Maine Memory Network, and the other sources indexed in the capstone); the Continental collapse figures ($241.5 million issued, 500 to 1,000 to 1 by May 1781) are from the U.S. Treasury's official history.
This post is informational, not financial, legal, or investment advice. The modern cases are described from official releases and consolidated public accounts as cited; institutions and publications are mentioned as nominative fair use with no affiliation implied.
