Money, Gold, and the Great Depression
Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
At the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia
March 2, 2004
federalreserve.gov
I am pleased to be able to present the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy here at Washington and Lee University. As you may know, Willis was an important figure in the early history of my current employer, the Federal Reserve System. While he was a professor at Washington and Lee, Willis advised Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, one of the key legislators involved in the founding of the Federal Reserve. Willis also served on the National Monetary Commission, which recommended the creation of the Federal Reserve, and he went on to become the research director at the Federal Reserve from 1918 to 1922. At the Federal Reserve, Willis pushed for the development of new and better economic statistics, facing the resistance of those who took the view that too many facts only confuse the issue. Willis was also the first editor of the Federal Reserve Bulletin, the official publication of the Fed, which in Willis's time as well as today provides a wealth of economic statistics. As an illustration of the intellectual atmosphere in Washington at the time he served, Willis reported that when the first copy of the Bulletin was presented to the Secretary of the Treasury, the esteemed Secretary replied, "This Government ain't going into the newspaper business."
Like Parker Willis, I was a professor myself before coming to the Federal Reserve Board. One topic of particular interest to me as a researcher was the performance of the Federal Reserve in its early days, particularly the part played by the young U.S. central bank in the Great Depression of the 1930s.1 In honor of Willis's important contribution to the design and creation of the Federal Reserve, I will speak today about the role of the Federal Reserve and of monetary factors more generally in the origin and propagation of the Great Depression. Let me offer two caveats before I begin: First, as I mentioned, H. Parker Willis resigned from the Fed in 1922, to take a post at Columbia University; thus, he is not implicated in any of the mistakes that the Federal Reserve made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Second, the views I will express today are my own and are not necessarily those of my colleagues in the Federal Reserve System.
The number of people with personal memory of the Great Depression is fast shrinking with........ |
