Current Federal Reserve Policy Under the Lens of Economic History

Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System's Centennial

Owen F. Humpage

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107099098
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316310731
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Macroeconomics
• Index: Economics

In December 2012, as a kick-off to the Federal Reserve System's centennial, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland asked leading monetary historians and macroeconomic economists to address current and recurring economic concerns that confront central banks from a historical perspective. The resulting papers, published in this volume, cover a wide range of issues, including the meaning of central-bank independence, the role of communications and rules in fostering credibility, the evolution of the lender-of-last-resort function, the mechanism through which banks transmit economic shocks, and prospects for a European monetary union. A retrospective on the Federal Reserve, this book contains essays by some of the world's most prominent financial historians and provides a thorough overview of the evolution of the monetary standard over the past two centuries. Offering historical context as a complement to economic theory and empiricism, these papers investigate how financial infrastructure shapes economic outcomes through comparisons of Canada and the United States.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• Discussants at the Conference
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Uses and Misuses of Economic History
• 2 Federal Reserve Policy Today in Historical Perspective
• 3 How and Why the Fed Must Change in Its Second Century
• 4 The Lender of Last Resort
• 5 Close but Not a Central Bank
• 6 Central Bank Independence
• 7 Politics on the Road to the U.S. Monetary Union
• 8 U.S. Precedents for Europe
• 9 The Limits of Bimetallism
• 10 The Reserve Pyramid and Interbank Contagion during the Great Depression
• 11 Would Large-Scale Asset Purchases Have Helped in the 1930s?
• 12 A Tale of Two Countries and Two Booms, Canada and the United States in the 1920s and the 2000s
• 13 It Is History but It’s No Accident
• 14 Monetary Regimes and Policy on a Global Scale
• 15 Reflections on the History and Future of Central Banking
• Index