Economist Richard Sylla of New York University has argued that in the 1790s, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton “established the financial foundations that would make the United States the most successful emerging market in the nineteenth century, and the economic colossus of the next that some would call the ‘American century.’”
a. What does Sylla mean by “the financial foundations’?
b. Why were these financial foundations important in making possible the rapid growth of the U.S. economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?