Monetary Politics: Origins of the Federal Reserve

Abstract

Nearly unique amongst the world's monetary bodies, the Federal Reserve defies description as a central bank. A century after its creation, the Fed retains a hybrid structure of a president-appointed, Senate-confirmed Washington board and twelve largely privately directed regional reserve banks—each of which remains moored in the cities originally selected in 1914. In this article we investigate the origins of the Federal Reserve System, focusing on the selection of the twelve reserve bank cities. In contrast to accounts that suggest politics played no role in the selection of the cities, we suggest that a range of political interests shaped Democrats' choices in designing the reserve system. The result was a decentralized institution that initially proved unable to coordinate monetary policy—a key contributor to the onset of the Great Depression less than two decades later.