Bernanke Ben

large-scale purchases of securities—a policy known as quantitative easing—until economic conditions improved substantially.

The 1960s also saw the beginning of one of the most traumatic economic events of postwar U.S. history, as well as one of the signal failures of economic policymaking—what we now call the Great Inflation.

President Woodrow Wilson did just that by signing the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. Consistent with progressive views of the time, which advocated scientific, rational policies to improve the economy, the new Federal Reserve System was intended to oversee and help stabilize America’s lightly regulated and often-dysfunctional banking system.