Chronicling the politics that led to the creation of the twelve Reserve Banks and the pursuant legal and political consequences, this paper argues that the Federal Reserve’s quasi-private Reserve Banks are, at best, opaque and unaccountable, and, at worst, unconstitutional. Following the Panic...

The paper aims to describe the contribution of four Harvard economists to the interpretation of the Great Depression and the policy decision making from 1933 to 1938. Lauchlin B. Currie, Jacob Viner, John H. Williams, Harry D. White, eminent scholars in the field of monetary and international...

This paper traces the evolution of housing finance in the United States from the deregulation of the financial system in the 1970s to the breakdown of the savings and loan industry and the development of GSE (government-sponsored enterprise) securitization and the private financial system. The...

Because financial and macroeconomic conditions are tightly interconnected, financial stability considerations are an important element of any monetary policy framework. Yet, the circumstances under which it would be appropriate for the Bank to use monetary policy to lean against financial risks...

The New Deal regulatory policies and institutions redesigned the U.S. financial structure and implicitly required the coordination between monetary policy and the regulatory framework; in that financial structure the Federal Reserve provided the reserves. The interest policy implicitly required...

This paper sets out to investigate the forces behind the so-called global capital flows paradoxʺ and related dollar glutʺ observed in the era of advancing financial globalization. The supposed paradox is that the developing world has increasingly come to pursue policies that result in current...

This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper "Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?" (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the "circuit approach". While some "circuitistes" have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory,...