Money and Banking in the United States - A Guide to the

In 2022, Menand published The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis, which recounts how the erosion of banking law and the rise of alternative forms of money have pushed the Fed to take on more and more responsibilities to keep the economy out of recession. [...] Part II reviews the history of the monetary system from the founding of the United States to the present with a focus on the 20th-century framework that eliminated disorderly monetary contractions and the subsequent liberalization that led to a return to what one might reasonably describe as “19th-century conditions.” Part III turns to current debates, situating various proposals within the concep. [...] If that’s inevitably going to happen at some point in the future, policymakers have decided that it would be best for the government to pick and choose who gets to enter the banking business in the first place.2 Another reason why the government might outsource the power to expand the money supply is to influence who benefits from the creation of new money. [...] In 1935, Congress also created the Federal Open Market Committee to actively manage the size of bank balance sheets and the creation of bank money to align the credit policies of the banking system with the public interest (Ricks et al. [...] In 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, released a report recommending that Congress enact new laws regulating the stablecoin market (US Department of the Treasury 2021).