Publication Date: 2 January 2003	cloth $75.00 · £52.50
UK publication date: 2 January 2003	800 pages · 0-226-51999-6

The Federal Reserve is arguably Washington's most powerful institution, and many believe Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is the nation's second-most-important government official. Not only the financial press but thousands of people across the globe pore over the Fed chairman's every word and action, hoping to decipher some clue of what his future policy decisions might be. And why shouldn't they? Vagaries in Fed policy can create millions of job, or destroy them—not just in the United States, but the world over.

But it wasn't always this way. When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, it was a decentralized institution made up of 12 semiautonomous regional Federal Reserve banks—largely passive, its guiding principles were regional autonomy and accommodation. By 1951, however, with the passage of the Treasury–Federal Reserve Accord, the Fed began to take shape as the independent and centralized institution we know today. With A History of the Federal Reserve, Allan H. Meltzer, one of the world's foremost monetary economists, has written the definitive biography of this institution, covering, in this first volume, its formative decades—the story of how the groundwork was laid to create a fiscal policy powerhouse of truly global reach.

Having been given extraordinary access to Fed documents, Meltzer sheds light not only on the policies the Federal Reserve pursued but also on the minds of the people who steered it. Specifically, Meltzer was able to examine documents unavailable to previous Federal Reserve scholars (like the minutes of the meetings of the New York Federal Reserve—which are not covered under the Freedom of Information Act). With these, Meltzer is able to delve deeply into the Federal Reserve's role in the Great Depression—and the actions (or lack thereof) that led to it. Breaking new ground, for example, A History of the Federal Reserve convincingly argues against the widely accepted notion that had Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, lived, the Great Depression would have been averted.

"Well-written and thoroughgoing" according to Library Journal, A History of the Federal Reserve is the culmination of decades of careful research by one of the nation's most learned and experienced economists. Combining nut-and-bolts policy detail with elegant prose, this first volume of Meltzer's magnum opus will be indispensable to historians, to scholars of monetary economics and economic history, and to central bankers and other practitioners of monetary policy.

Allan H. Meltzer is the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University and Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. He has served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1988–89) and as an Honorary Adviser to the Bank of Japan (1986–2002). He also led a federal commission formed to reevaluate and overhaul the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and other international financial institutions.

The author or coauthor of several books, most recently Money, Credit, and Policy, Meltzer has written for the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, and CNBC. In short, few economists are more qualified to speak on the U.S. economy and its history than Allan Meltzer. Meltzer is also available to discuss both the concrete and abstract ramifications of Federal Reserve policy.