The Fed

100 years ago today an institution (and employer) was born.

From NPR…

He told a handful of New York bankers to go on a given night, one by one, to a train station in New Jersey. There they would find a private rail car hitched to the back of a southbound train. To conceal their identities, Aldrich told the bankers to come dressed as duck hunters and to address each other only by first name. 

The train headed south, and the bankers got off in Georgia. They spent the next week holed up in a private club at a place called Jekyll Island. 

At Jekyll Island, Aldrich and the bankers came up with a plan. They knew many Americans thought a central bank could become too powerful, too influential in the economy. So they came up with a classic American workaround: They decided the U.S. should create lots of little central banks, scattered all around the country. 

The plan they came up with still had a long way to go. It got shot down the first time in Congress. The plan for a central bank was debated, changed significantly, renamed. But the basic idea held up. And on Dec. 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law.

Reminds me of the time many years ago when we visited my parent's friends who lived on Jeykll Island.

Little did I know...