Abstract
On December 23, 1913, Congress approved the Federal Reserve Act. Passage came after lengthy dispute, many pages of testimony, and more than thirty volumes of reports containing the findings of the National Monetary Commission. Despite the detailed investigation of financial systems that preceded passage and the number of alternative bills drafted, considered and dismissed, the Act says very little about the purposes of the legislation. Decisions about how the central bank was to operate, and the objectives to be served, were left in large part to the organizers.
I am grateful to Anna Schwartz, William Poole, Tom Mayer, Raymond Lombra and George Benston for comments on an earlier draft. Helpful assistance was received from Ezra Angrist, Chris Bryan and Jeremy Fand. This paper appeared previously as Chapter 1 of Monetary Policy on the 75th Anniversary of the Federal Reserve System M.T.Belongia (ed.), Kluwer (1990).
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Meltzer, A.H. (1991). The Federal Reserve at Seventy Five. In: Eckstein, Z. (eds) Aspects of Central Bank Policy Making. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76774-6_1
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