The Federal Reserve System: An Early History of the Implementation and Challenges of America's Bank

The Federal Reserve Act, passed by Congress on December 23, 1913, is the outcome of a discussion of banking conditions extending more or less sporadically over the years since the Civil War, but assuming an increasing degree of urgency from and after the panic of 1893.

The National Banking System had been established during the Civil War, partly as the result of the Government's financial necessities of that period. It was, before the adoption of the new act, a system of independent and unre...