The Origins, History, and Future of the Federal Reserve: A Return to Jekyll Island

This book contains essays presented at a conference held in November 2010 to mark the centenary of the famous 1910 Jekyll Island meeting of leading American financiers and the U.S. Treasury. The 1910 meeting resulted in the Aldrich Plan, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act that was enacted by Congress in 1913. The 2010 conference, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Rutgers University, featured assessments of the Fed's near 100-year track record by prominent economic historians and macroeconomists. The final chapter of the book records a panel discussion of Fed policy making by the current and former senior Federal Reserve officials.

Michael D. Bordo is professor of economics and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has published many articles in leading journals in monetary economics and economic history. Recent publications include A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods International Monetary System (1993, with Barry Eichengreen), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (1998, with Claudia Goldin and Eugene White), Essays on the Gold Standard and Related Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 1999; paperback 2005), and Globalization in Historical Perspective (2003, with Alan Taylor and Jeffrey Williamson). He is also a founding and managing editor of the Cambridge University Press Studies in Macroeconomic History series.

William Roberds is a research economist and policy advisor with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His areas of responsibility include basic research and policy analysis. Dr Roberds's research focuses primarily on the fields of payment systems, macroeconomics and econometrics. His research has been published in leading economic journals including the Journal of Monetary Economics, the International Economic Review and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, as well as in Federal Reserve System publications. Dr Roberds joined the Bank in July 1987. Previously he was an assistant professor at Brown University (1982–84) and an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (1984–87). He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.