Volume 18, Number 1 (Spring 2015)
Recently the Federal Reserve reached its one hundred year anniversary. This milestone provided a nice occasion for economists to analyze the Fed’s performance in the past century. As a result in the past several years there have been many conferences, special journal issues, and books that have centered on the Fed’s centennial and its record. The present book is a collection of essays from a 2010 conference dedicated to that task. The conference marked the centennial of the famous Jekyll Island meeting (1910), a private gathering of U.S government officials and bankers dedicated to the formation of a central bank. It was significant because what came out it, the Aldrich Plan, eventually became the body of the Federal Reserve Act. The 2010 conference, which was held in the same location as the 1910 meeting, included many monetary heavyweights, such as Fed chairmen Ben S. Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Paul A. Volcker along with Michael D. Bordo, Charles W. Calomiris, Barry Eichengreen, Alan H. Meltzer, Ellis W. Tallman, David C. Wheelock, Eugene N. White, and more. Anyone interested in either monetary economics or macroeconomic history will undoubtedly have heard of these names, as they have been very influential in these fields.
