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Bernanke Speech: "The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve..."

Ben S. Bernanke speech "The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve: The Policy Record, Lessons Learned, and Prospects for the Future," a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts

July 10, 2013

A Century of U.S. Central Banking: Goals, Frameworks, Accountability

I'd like to thank the National Bureau of Economic Research for organizing this conference in recognition of the Federal Reserve's centennial, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to participate. In keeping with the spirit of the conference, my remarks today will take a historical perspective. I will leave discussion of current policy to today's question-and-answer session and, of course, to my congressional testimony next week.

Today, I'll discuss the evolution over the past 100 years of three key aspects of Federal Reserve policymaking: the goals of policy, the policy framework, and accountability and communication. The changes over time in these three areas provide a useful perspective, I believe, on how the role and functioning of the Federal Reserve have changed since its founding in 1913, as well as some lessons for the present and for the future. I will pay particular attention to several key episodes of the Fed's history, all of which have been referred to in various contexts with the adjective "Great" attached to them: the Great Experiment of the Federal Reserve's founding, the Great Depression, the Great Inflation and subsequent disinflation, the Great Moderation, and the recent Great Recession.

The Great Experiment
In the words of one of the authors of the Federal Reserve Act, Robert Latham Owen, the Federal Reserve was established to "provide a means by which periodic panics which shake the American Republic and do it enormous injury shall be stopped."1 In short, the original goal of the Great Experiment that was the founding of the Fed was the preservation of financial stability.2 At the time, the standard view of panics was that they were triggered when the needs of business and agriculture for liquid funds outstripped the available supply--as when seasonal plantings or shipments of crops had to be financed, for example--and that panics were further exacerbated by the incentives of banks and private individuals to hoard liquidity during such times.3 The new institution was intended to relieve such strains by providing an "elastic" currency--that is, by providing liquidity as needed to individual member banks through the discount window; commercial banks, in turn, would then be able to accommodate their customers. Interestingly, although congressional advocates hoped the creation of the Fed would help prevent future panics, they did not fully embrace the idea that the Fed should help end ongoing panics by serving as lender of last resort, as had been recommended by the British economist and writer Walter Bagehot.4 Legislators imposed limits on the Federal Reserve's ability to lend in response to panics, for example, by denying nonmember banks access to the discount window and by restricting the types of collateral that the Fed could accept.5

The framework that the Federal Reserve employed in its early years to promote financial stability reflected in large measure the influence of the so-called real bills doctrine, as well as the fact that the United States was on the gold standard.6 In the framework of the real bills doctrine, the Federal Reserve saw its function as meeting the needs of business for liquidity--consistent with the idea of providing an elastic currency--with the ultimate goal of supporting financial and economic stability.7 When business activity was increasing, the Federal Reserve helped accommodate the need for credit by supplying liquidity to banks; when business was contracting and less credit was needed, the Fed reduced the liquidity in the system.

As I mentioned, the Federal Reserve pursued this approach to policy in the context of the gold standard. Federal Reserve notes were redeemable in gold on demand, and the Fed was required to maintain a gold reserve equal to 40 percent of outstanding notes. However, contrary to the principles of an idealized gold standard, the Federal Reserve often took actions to prevent inflows and outflows of gold from being fully translated into changes in the domestic money supply.8 This practice, together with the size of the U.S. economy, gave the Federal Reserve considerable autonomy in monetary policy and, in particular, allowed the Fed to conduct policy according to the real bills doctrine without much hindrance.

The policy framework of the Fed's early years has been much criticized in retrospect. Although the gold standard did not appear to have greatly constrained U.S. monetary policy in the years after the Fed's founding, subsequent research has highlighted the extent to which the international gold standard served to destabilize the global economy in the late 1920s and early 1930s.9 Likewise, economic historians have pointed out that, under the real bills doctrine, the Fed increased the money supply precisely at those times at which business activity and upward pressures on prices were strongest; that is, monetary policy was procyclical. Thus, the Fed's actions tended to increase rather than decrease the volatility in economic activity and prices.10

During this early period, the new central bank did make an important addition to its menu of policy tools. Initially, the Fed's main tools were the quantity of its lending through the discount window and the interest rate at which it lent, the discount rate. Early on, however, to generate earnings to finance its operations, the Federal Reserve began purchasing government securities in the open market--what came to be known as open market operations. In the early 1920s, Fed officials discovered that these operations affected the supply and cost of bank reserves and, consequently, the terms on which banks extended credit to their customers. Subsequently, of course, open market operations became a principal monetary policy tool, one that allowed the Fed to interact with the broader financial markets, not only with banks.11

I've discussed the original mandate and early policy framework of the Fed. What about its accountability to the public? As this audience knows, when the Federal Reserve was established, the question of whether it should be a private or a public institution was highly contentious. The compromise solution created a hybrid Federal Reserve System. The System was headed by a governmentally appointed Board, which initially included the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency. But the 12 regional Reserve Banks were placed under a mixture of public and private oversight, including board members drawn from the private sector, and they were given considerable scope to make policy decisions that applied to their own Districts. For example, Reserve Banks were permitted to set their own discount rates, subject to a minimum set by the Board.

While the founders of the Federal Reserve hoped that this new institution would provide financial and hence economic stability, the policy framework and the institutional structure would prove inadequate to the challenges the Fed would soon face.

The Great Depression
The Great Depression was the Federal Reserve's most difficult test. Tragically, the Fed failed to meet its mandate to maintain financial stability. In particular, although the Fed provided substantial liquidity to the financial system following the 1929 stock market crash, its response to the subsequent banking panics was limited at best; the widespread bank failures and the collapse in money and credit that ensued were major sources of the economic downturn.12 Bagehot's dictum to lend freely at a penalty rate in the face of panic appeared to have few adherents at the Federal Reserve of that era.13

Economists have also identified a number of instances from the late 1920s to the early 1930s when Federal Reserve officials, in the face of the sharp economic contraction and financial upheaval, either tightened monetary policy or chose inaction. Some historians trace these policy mistakes to the early death of Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in 1928, which left the decentralized system without an effective leader.14 Whether valid or not, this hypothesis raises the interesting question of what intellectual framework an effective leader would have drawn on at the time to develop and justify a more activist monetary policy. The degree to which the gold standard actually constrained U.S. monetary policy during the early 1930s is debated; but the gold standard philosophy clearly did not encourage the sort of highly expansionary policies that were needed.15 The same can be said for the real bills doctrine, which apparently led policymakers to conclude, on the basis of low nominal interest rates and low borrowings from the Fed, that monetary policy was appropriately supportive and that further actions would be fruitless.16 Historians have also noted the prevalence at the time of yet another counterproductive doctrine: the so-called liquidationist view, that depressions perform a necessary cleansing function.17 It may be that the Federal Reserve suffered less from lack of leadership in the 1930s than from the lack of an intellectual framework for understanding what was happening and what needed to be done.

The Fed's inadequate policy frameworks ultimately collapsed under the weight of economic failures, new ideas, and political developments. The international gold standard was abandoned during the 1930s. The real bills doctrine likewise lost prestige after the disaster of the 1930s; for example, the Banking Act of 1935 instructed the Federal Reserve to use open market operations with consideration of "the general credit situation of the country," not just to focus narrowly on short-term liquidity needs.18 The Congress also expanded the Fed's ability to provide credit through the discount window, allowing loans to a broader array of counterparties, secured by a broader variety of collateral.19

The experience of the Great Depression had major ramifications for all three aspects of the Federal Reserve I am discussing here: its goals, its policy framework, and its accountability to the public. With respect to goals, the high unemployment of the Depression--and the fear that high unemployment would return after World War II--elevated the maintenance of full employment as a goal of macroeconomic policy. The Employment Act of 1946 made the promotion of employment a general objective for the federal government. Although the Fed did not have a formal... More