Abstract
Governor Laurence Meyer gave a talk in 1998 describing a Treasury lunch at the Board at which the question arose as to what the four letters FOMC meant. To quote him, “My concern about the public awareness of the FOMC was heightened recently during one of the weekly luncheons Governors host for a small group comprised of the staffs at the Board and the Treasury. A very senior member of the Treasury staff, during our luncheon conversion, asked me if I knew what ‘FOMC’ stood for. A strange question, I thought, coming from so knowledgeable a person. I replied that I thought I did, but, just to be sure, what did he believe it stood for? He replied ‘Fruit of the Month Club.’”1 I’ll add just two comments regarding that story. First, FOMC is an acronym that in truth always stands for the Federal Open Market Committee. Second, I actually attended that lunch, and I remember vividly what Meyer described and who cracked the joke. It was none other than Timothy F. Geithner, later himself president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and vice chairman of the aforementioned FOMC before becoming Secretary of the Treasury.
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Notes
Laurence H. Meyer, “Come with Me to the FOMC,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, April 2, 1998.
The chart is taken from Deborah J. Danker and Matthew M. Luecke, “Background on FOMC Meeting Minutes,” The Federal Reserve Bulletin 91, no. 2, Spring 2005, p. 176.
Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve: Volume 1, 1913–1951, The University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 497.
Michael D. Bordo, “Review of A History of the Federal Reserve Volume 1 (2003) by Allan H. Meltzer,” Journal of Monetary Economics 53, no. 3, April 2006, p. 652.
Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve: Volume 1, 1913–1951, The University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 576.
Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States: 1867–1960, A Study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 459–462. I am indebted to Allan Meltzer in a personal communication on August 17, 2011, for preventing me from following those authors into making the same interpretative error about the power of the 1936–37 hikes in required reserve ratios and for pointing me in the right direction.
Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 2007, Harper Perennial, 2008, Amazon Kindle locations 21–23.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 110.
Both quotations are in Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 5 and 276.
William McChesney Martin, “Some Observations on Monetary Matters,” June 25, 1965, p. 4.
Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 1, 1951–1969, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 491.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Volume 8, Little, Brown, & Co., 1901, pp. 126–127.
Allan H. Meltzer, “Origins of the Great Inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March/April 2005, p. 154.
Binyamin Appelbaum, “Economic Stimulus as the Election Nears? It’s Been Done Before,” New York Times, September 11, 2012.
Stephen H. Axilrod, Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 24–25.
An informative narrative history of monetary policy under Martin appears in Athanasios Orphanides and John Williams, “Monetary Policy Mistakes and the Evolution of Inflation Expectations,” in Michael D. Bordo and Athanasios Orphanides, eds., The Great Inflation: The Rebirth of Modern Central Banking (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report), The University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 257–265.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 147.
Wyatt C. Wells, Economist in an Uncertain World: Arthur F. Burns and the Federal Reserve, 1970–1978, 1994, Columbia University Press: New York, p. 18.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 159.
Edward C. Ettin, “Financial and Economic Environment of the 1960’s in relation to the U.S. Government Securities Market,” Joint Treasury-Federal Reserve Study of the U.S. Government Securities Market: Staff Studies—Part 2, December 1971;
Franco Modigliani and Richard C. Sutch, “Debt Management and the Term Structure of Interest Rates: An Empirical Analysis of Recent Experience,” Journal of Political Economy 75, no. 4 (Supplement); and Eric T. Swanson, “Let’s Twist Again: A High-Frequency Event-Study Analysis of Operation Twist and Its Implications for QE2,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2011.
Paul A. Samuelson and Robert M. Solow, “Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy,” American Economic Review 50, May 1960.
Nancy Beck Young, Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism & the American Dream, Southern Methodist University Press, 2000, pp. 6–7; quotation from the transcript of the Representative Carter Manasco Oral History Interview, January 11, 1979, conducted by Charles T. Morrissey, 22, Former Members of Congress, Inc., LC.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 191.
Diane Werneke, “H. Con. Res. 133 and Monetary Policy and Subsequent Congressional Actions,” memorandum to Don Winn, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, September 1, 2000.
Henry S. Reuss, When Government Was Good: Memories of a Life in Politics, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, p. 101.
Nancy Beck Young, Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism & the American Dream, Southern Methodist University Press, 2000, p. 206; the quotation is from the Congressional Record, 90th Cong., 2nd sess., 10132; for information on the proposed impeachment, she cites a letter from Wright Patman to Robert M. Harris, April 25, 1968, in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas.
Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer, The Federal Reserve’s Attachment to the Free Reserve Concept, House Committee on Banking and Currency: Washington, DC; reprinted in Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer, eds., Monetary Economics, Blackwell, 1989.
Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 1, 1951–1969, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 82.
Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 1, 1951–1969, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 379.
John T. Woolley, Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 122.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 1; the quotation from Johnson is from a telephone call from Johnson to Fowler on December 5, 1965, in the tape library Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas.
Sherman J. Maisel, Managing the Dollar: An Inside View by a Recent Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, W.W. Norton & Co., 1973, p. 69.
Allan H. Meltzer made these points in “Origins of the Great Inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March/April 2005, pp. 152–54.
Robert P. Bremner, Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 237–38.
Andrew F. Brimmer, “Andrew Brimmer Remembers William McChesney Martin Jr.,” The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, September 1998, p. 2.
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© 2016 David E. Lindsey
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Lindsey, D.E. (2016). Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Splitting from the Treasury in Adolescence and Maturing More—September 1935–January 1970. In: A Century of Monetary Policy at the Fed. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57859-4_3
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