The long road to accommodative central banking: the US case

Abstract

For Basil Moore and post-Keynesians who have followed him in developing the theory of endogenous money, accommodative central-bank behavior is a logical necessity in credit-money economies. Such central banks have no choice but to accommodate the banking system's demand for liquidity. Accommodative central banking evolved through a historical process, as this paper shows for the specific case of the US economy. The road to accommodative central banking was a long one in the US, marked by failed experiments with alternative institutional regimes: the Second Bank of the US of the early national period, the urban clearing-houses of the late nineteenth century, and the early Federal Reserve.