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 Feds 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.
Introduction Michael D. Bordo and William Roberds; 1. To establish a more effective supervision of banking: how the birth of the Fed altered bank supervision Eugene N. White; 2. Comment Warren Weber; 3. The promise and performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort Michael D. Bordo and David C. Wheelock; 4. Comment Ellis Tallman; 5. Where it all began: lending of last resort and Bank of England monitoring during the Overend, Gurney panic of 1866 Marc Flandreau and Stefano Ugolini; 6. Comment Barry Eichengreen; 7. Volatile times and persistent conceptual errors: US monetary policy 1914-51 Charles W. Calomiris; 8. Comment Allan Meltzer; 9. Government, credit markets, and economic activity Lawrence Christiano and Daisuke Ikeda; 10. Policy debates at the FOMC: 1993-2002 Marvin Goodfriend; 11. Two models of land overvaluation and their implications Narayana Kocherlakota; 12. Panel discussion: Fed policymaking in practice Ben S. Bernanke, E. Gerald Corrigan and Alan Greenspan.