US Precedents for Europe

Abstract

This chapter investigates two of the most widely debated aspects of US fiscal and financial integration: (1) the responsibility of the federation for state-level debts and for the creditworthiness of states; and (2) the working of a federal central bank. Today’s fiscal federalism in the United States is relatively robust, but the road from 1790 was rocky; and the first two decades of the Federal Reserve as rife with monetary mistakes as the first fifteen years of the European Central Bank.