Description
How did the US Federal Reserve System become the global structural force that it is today, regulating the supply of money and credit on a global scale? Standard accounts explain the emergence of the Fed in 1913 as an institutional response to the disorder of the domestic US banking system, the international role of the dollar being a later development with little place in its original design. Those who have investigated the international dimensions of the Fed’s origins have emphasized the importance of export interests in propelling the US policy elite to establish a central bank. This paper argues that the international sources of the Fed were far more central to its formation than either of these approaches suggest. Drawing on primary and archival documents, I investigate how the architects of the Fed drew on their studies of imperial finance, as well as their own experience in international financial integration in the US state’s newly established colonial empire, to inform their designs for the American central banking system. Uncovering the imperial origins of the Fed’s institutional design clarifies how a purportedly domestic institution came to exercise structural power in the world economy.
