The Political Economy of U.S. Monetary Policy: How the Federal Reserve Gained Control and Uses It

Mainstream economists explain the Federal Reserve’s behavior over its one hundred years of existence as (usually failed) attempts to stabilize the economy on a non-inflationary growth path. The most important monetary event during those first one hundred years was the replacement of fixed exchange rates, based on a gold-exchange standard, with flexible exchange rates.

In this book, Dickens explains how flexible exchange rates became necessary to accommodate the Federal Reserve’s relentless ...