In the period just before and after the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, bankers, economists, and legislators were intensely absorbed in discussing how to assure a proper functional relationship between the future central bank and the commercial banking system. During the sixty-odd years that followed, many changes have occurred to affect one side or the other of the Federal Reserve-banking system relationship. Much less attention has been devoted, however, to the current state of the relationship between the banking system and the Federal Reserve in regard to the conduct of national monetary policy. It is to this area-in the fundamentally important field of macroeconomic policy-that this book is addressed. The field is large, and the Federal Reserve Board shares responsibility with other important economic decision-makers for guiding the course of the economy. The book does not undertake to cover the whole subject of macroeconomic policy. What it does seek to examine are two areas that stand squarely at the common border where Fed monetary control meets the banking system.

In the period just before and after the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, bankers, economists, and legislators were intensely absorbed in discussing how to assure a proper functional relationship between the future central bank and the commercial banking system. During the sixty-odd years that followed, many changes have occurred to affect one side or the other of the Federal Reserve-banking system relationship. Much less attention has been devoted, however, to the current state of the relationship between the banking system and the Federal Reserve in regard to the conduct of national monetary policy. It is to this area-in the fundamentally important field of macroeconomic policy-that this book is addressed. The field is large, and the Federal Reserve Board shares responsibility with other important economic decision-makers for guiding the course of the economy. The book does not undertake to cover the whole subject of macroeconomic policy. What it does seek to examine are two areas that stand squarely at the common border where Fed monetary control meets the banking system

Tucker presents guiding principles for ensuring that central bankers and other unelected policymakers remain stewards of the common good.

This volume collects the proceedings from a conference on the evolution and practice of central banking sponsored by the Central Bank Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The articles and discussants' comments in this volume largely focus on two questions: the need for central banks, and how to maintain price stability once they are established. The questions addressed include whether large banks (or coalitions of small banks) can substitute for government regulation and due central bank liquidity provision; whether the future will have fewer central banks or more; the possibility of private means to deliver a uniform currency; if competition across sovereign currencies can ensure global price stability; the role of learning (and unlearning) the lessons of the past inflationary episodes in understanding central bank behavior; and an analysis of the European Central Bank.

Employing a light and lively writing style, the book starts with the history of central banking in England and the United States, explains in detail how the Fed works, and covers the Fed's recent unprecedented activities to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into Greatest Depression. A last chapter presents a detailed scorecard of the Fed chairmen over the last 40 years.

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers. Based on the 1996 Lionel Robbins Lectures, this readable book deals succinctly, in a nontechnical manner, with a wide variety of issues in monetary policy. The book also includes the author's suggested solution to an age-old problem in monetary theory: what it means for monetary policy to be "neutral."