Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946

In the turbulent years between passage of the Federal Reserve Act (1913) and the Bretton Woods Agreement (1945), the peoples of the Western world suffered two world wars, two major and several minor international financial panics, an epidemic of currency devaluations and debt repudiations, civil wars, and revolutions.

No period in history could serve better as a case study for the analysis of applied economic policy. No one could have been better situated to write that study than Benjamin M...