This book contains essays presented at a conference held in November 2010 to mark the centenary of the famous 1910 Jekyll Island meeting of leading American financiers and the US Treasury. The 1910 meeting resulted in the Aldrich Plan, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act that was enacted by Congress in 1913. The 2010 conference, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Rutgers University, featured assessments of the Fed's near 100-year track record by prominent economic historians and macroeconomists. The final chapter of the book records a panel discussion of Fed policy making by the current and former senior Federal Reserve officials.

Provides an in-depth overview of the Federal Reserve System, including information about monetary policy and the economy, the Federal Reserve in the international sphere, supervision and regulation, consumer and community affairs and services offered by Reserve Banks. Contains several appendixes, including a brief explanation of Federal Reserve regulations, a glossary of terms, and a list of additional publications.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Collects a series of lectures the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve gave in 2012 about the Federal Reserve and the 2008 financial crisis.

The paper considers the merits of rules and discretion for monetary policy when the structure of the macroeconomic model and the probability distributions of disturbances are not well defined. It is argued that when it is costly to delay policy reactions to seldom-experienced shocks until formal algorithmic learning has been accomplished, and when time consistency problems are significant, a mixed strategy that combines a simple verifiable rule with discretion is attractive. The paper also discusses mechanisms for mitigating credibility problems and emphasizes that arguments against various types of simple rules lose their force under a mixed strategy.

This first volume of Allan H. Meltzer's history of the Federal Reserve System covers the period from the Federal Reserve's founding in 1913 through the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951. To understand why the Federal Reserve acted as it did at key points in its history, Meltzer draws on meeting minutes, correspondence, and other internal documents (many made public only during the 1970s) to trace the reasoning behind its policy decisions. He explains why the Federal Reserve remained passive throughout most of the economic decline that led to the Great Depression, and how the Board's actions helped to produce the deep recession of 1937 and 1938. He also highlights the impact that individuals had on the institution, such as Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1920s, who played a large role in the adoption of a more active monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. From attempts to build a new international financial system at the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933 to the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Meltzer also examines the influence the Federal Reserve has had on international affairs. The second, and last volume of this history covers the years 1951 to 1986 in two parts. These include the time of the Federal Reserve's second major mistake, the Great Inflation, and the subsequent disinflation. The volume summarizes the record of monetary policy during the inflation and disinflation.