Abstract
FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKS, namely, enterprises being legally liable to pay some substance on demand while regularly having too little on hand to satisfy all their obligations, are commonly associated exclusively with money. Conceivably, fractional reserve banks can deal in substances other than money. As it happens, Chicago's warehousemen of the 1860s practiced fractional reserve banking not in dollars or sterling but in grain. l These warehousemen operated in the style of a conventional financial intermediary, borrowing short through demand deposits in order to lend long. The natural evolution of fractional reserve banking in grain in nineteenth-century Chicago was interrupted, however. Ever more stringent laws, the result of repeated campaigns against fraudulent receipts, eventually forced Chicago's warehousemen to keep 100 percent reserves. Consequently, the organization of the grain trade past and present not only provides information about the development of fractional reserve banking in general but reveals the effects of a rare experiment in outlawing fractional reserve banking.
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