To fully understand the Federal Reserve and its role today we need to examine its origins and the men who founded it. Using extensive archival sources, Richard Naclerio investigates the highly secretive events that surrounded the Fed’s creation and the bankers, financiers and tycoons that shaped both its organization and the role it was to play over the next century. The motivations of these handful of men who met in secret on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to create the first draft of the Federal Reserve Act are scrutinized, and the fraternal and business ties and shared ideologies that bound these men together revealed. Naclerio shows how vested interest and the pursuit of power and profit brought about America’s first central bank. The book makes a significant contribution to economic and financial history and sheds new light on the creation of one of the world’s most important financial institutions and how it came to have the national and international influence it exerts today.
