Unfortunately, you won't read about the Federal Reserve's role in the run-up to the Great Depression from Roger Lowenstein's discussion of the creation of the Fed beginning on this date 100 years ago, here in The New York Times:
One of the plan’s most strident critics, Representative Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., the father of the aviator, predicted that the Federal Reserve Act would establish “the most gigantic trust on earth,” and that the Fed would become an economic dictator or, as he put it, an “invisible government by the money power.”
Savers know the dictator. Executive Order 6102 in April 1933 made them hand over their gold at $20.67 for an ounce only to learn in May the price per ounce was "raised" to $35. Savers now experience the same trick in a different form because they earn nothing for a lifetime of trouble due to ZIRP. It is not a coincidence that Lowenstein just leaves out the fact that one of the world's most gigantic busts occurred not 17 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, just as it is not a coincidence that the current bust occurred not 10 years after Gramm-Leach-Bliley undid the banking reform of Glass-Steagall which had to be passed to fix what was wrong with Federal Reserve banking.
Particularly insidious is Lowenstein's use of the terms Fed "framers" and Fed "originalism" in discussing the Federal Reserve's origins, which had nothing to do with the framers of the constitution or the originalism which seeks to recover their lost ideas, ideas which were already long lost in 1913. Apparently those ideas still need to be killed.
Methinks the liberal doth protest too much of "ghosts".
