The Fortuitous Fed

Established at the end of 1913, the Federal Reserve made Allied loans and wartime deficits possible by centralizing reserves and backstopping the banks. Rothbard traces the five-year campaign by Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, then follows Benjamin Strong’s Morgan ties and the inflation undertaken to prop up the pound—setting the stage for the collapse of 1929 to 1931.