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first place is reduced. However, this activity, and I will come

back to it, this is something which is not unique to central banks. In the United States, for example, there are a number of different agencies, like the FDIC or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that work with the Fed in supervising the financial system. So this is not unique to central banks and so I'll be down playing this for the time being and focusing on the two principle tools, monetary policy and lender of last resort activities。

Now, where do central banks come from? One thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time. The Swedes set up a central bank in 1668, three and a half centuries ago. The Bank of England was founded in

1694 and that of course for many decades or if not centuries was the most important and influential central bank in the world, and France in 1800. So, central bank theory and practice is, again, not a new thing. We have been thinking about these issues collectively as an economics

profession and in other contexts for many, many years. Now, I've exaggerated slightly in a sense that, say, the Bank of England in 1694 wasn't set up from scratch, it's a full-fledged central bank, it was originally a private institution. And over time, it acquired some of the functions of a central bank such as issuing money or serving as lender of last resort. But over time, these

central banks became essentially government agencies, government institutions as they all are today. Certainly, one important responsibility of central banks for much of the period that I'm talking about was to manage the gold standard to issue paper money that was backed by gold and I'll talk more about gold in a few moments。

Now, the lender of last resort function, which I mentioned earlier, became important in the-- mostly in the 19th century. Early in the 19th century, the Bank of England was doing a lot of this type of activity and they became very good at it. And as we'll see, while the United States was suffering with banking panics in the latter part of the 19th century, banking panics in the United Kingdom were quite rare. So the Bank of England sort of set the pace in some sense. It was the most important central bank and it helped establish the practices and the approaches that we still use today. Now, I need to talk a little bit because it's less familiar about what a financial panic is. In general, a financial panic is sparked by a loss of confidence in an institution and I think the best way to explain this is to give a familiar example. How many of you have ever seen the

movie "It's a Wonderful Life"? No? Less people are watching Christmas movies than they used to be, I guess [laughter]. Well, one of the problems that Jimmy Stewart runs into as a banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a threatened run on his institution. An
d what is a run? Well, let's imagine a situation like Jimmy Stewart's situation before there was any deposit insurance, no FDIC. And imagine you have a bank on the corner, just a regular commercial bank, the first bank of Washington, D.C., and this bank makes loans to businesses and the like, and it finances itself

by taking deposits from the public and deposits are demand deposits, which means that anybody can pull out their money anytime they want which is important because people use deposits for ordinary activities, like shopping。

Now imagine what would happen if for some reason, a rumor goes around that this bank has made some bad loans and is losing money. As a depositor, you say to yourself, "Well, I don't know if this rumor is true or not。” But what I know is if that I wait and everybody else pulls out their money and I'm the last person in line, I may end up with nothing." So what's--what are you going to do? You're going to go to the bank and say, "Well, I'm not sure if this is a true rumor or not, but knowing that everybody else is going to come to the bank, I'm going to pull my money out." And so, depositors line up, they pull out their cash, no bank holds cash equal to all their deposits, they put that cash into loans. So the only way the bank can pay off the depositors, once it gets through its minimal cash reserves, is to sell or otherwise dispose of its loans. But it's very

hard to sell a commercial loan, it takes time, you get--you have to sell it at a discount. And by the time you've gotten around to doing that, depositors are at your door and saying, "Where is my money?" And so ultimately, a panic can lead the bank to close and be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The bank will fail, it will have to sell off its assets at a discount price and ultimately, many depositors might lose money as happened in the Great Depression, for example. So a bank panic is a problem which is faced by any institution where it has loans or other illiquid-type assets and

it finances itself by short-term deposits or other short-term lending. Now, panics can be a serious problem. Obviously, if one bank is having problems, people--the bank next door might begin to worry about problems in their bank. And so, a bank run can lead to widespread bank runs or a banking panic, more broadly. Sometimes, banks again, pre-FDIC, banks would respond to a panic or a run by refusing to pay out deposits and they would just say, "No more, we're closing

the window." So that restriction on the access of the depositors to their money was another bad outcome and caused problems for people who had to make a payroll or had to buy their groceries. Many banks would fail and beyond that, banking panics often spread into other markets, were often associated with stock market crashes for example. And all those things together, as you might expect, were bad for the economy. And so, a banking panic could lead to a crash in the economy as
well。

So here's a formal definition just for your reference unless you see people around, standing around in the corner waiting to take out their money, but a financial panic is--can occur anytime you have an institution that has longer term illiquid assets, so think of a bank that has loans that are long-term loans that are illiquid in the sense that it takes time and effort to sell those loans and which are financed on the other side of the balance sheet by short-term liabilities like deposits but could be other things for short-term liabilities. Anytime you have that situation, you have the possibility that the people who put their money in the bank or the lenders or the

depositors may say, "Wait a minute, I don't want to leave my money here, I'm pulling it out," and you have a serious problem for the institution. So now to come back to what we were talking about before, how can--how could the Fed have helped Jimmy Stewart? Well, again, lender of last resort is a basic tool. Imagine that Jimmy Stewart is paying out the money to his depositors. He's got plenty of good loans but he can't change those into cash and he's got people at the door looking for money. Well, if the Federal Reserve was on the job, Jimmy Stewart could call up to the local Fed office and say, "Look, I got a whole bunch of good loans, I can offer them as collateral, give me cash, give me a cash loan against this collateral." Okay? So the central bank would act in this way as a lender of last resort. The--Jimmy Stewart can take the cash from the central bank, he can pay off his depositors and then, so long as he really is solvent, that is, as

long as his loans are really are good, the run will be quelled, will be stopped and the panic will come to an end. So by providing short-term loans, taking his collateral, the illiquid assets of the institution, central bank can put money into the system, pay off depositors, pay off short-term lenders, and calm the situation and end the panic. This was something that the Bank of England figured out very early. In fact, a very key person in the--in intellectual development here was a journalist named Walter Bagehot who thought a lot about banking, central banking policy. And he had a dictum which said that during a panic, central bank should lend freely, whoever comes to your door as long as they collateral, give them money, this is during a banking panic. Against good assets, to make sure that you get your money back, you need to have collateral and that collateral has to be good or it has to be discounted and they could lend half the value of the collateral, for example, and charge a penalty interest rate so that people don't just take advantage of the situation but rather they signal that they really need the money because they're willing to pay a slightly higher interest rate. So again, if you follow Bagehot's rule, you can stop financial panics. As a bank or other institution finds that it's losing its f
ne whether it was in fact a sound bank. If it was, it would reopen and normally, that would calm things down. So there was

some private activity to try to stabilize the banking system. However, in the end, these kinds of private arrangements were just not sufficient. They didn't have sufficient resources. They didn't have the credibility of an independent central bank. After all, people could always wonder whether the banks were acting in other than the public interest since they were all private institutions. And so, it was necessary for the United States to get a lender of last resort that could stop runs on illiquid but still solvent commercial banks. So this is not a hypothetical issue. Financial panics in the United States were a very big problem. So here's the period basically

from the restoration of the gold standard after the Civil War in 1879 through the founding of the Federal Reserve. And the graph here shows the number of banks closing during each of these six major banking panics that occurred during that time in the United States. You can see in the very severe financial panic of 1893, more than 500 banks failed across the country. So that was a really big panic and it had significant consequences for the financial system and for the

economy. Now, 1907 was also a pretty sharp financial crisis. The banks that failed were larger. And it was after that crisis that the Congress began to say, "Well, wait a minute, maybe we need to do something about this, maybe we need a central bank, a government agency that can address the problem of financial panics." So that process began, there was a very substantial amount of research done. A 23-volume study was prepared for the Congress about central banking practices and Congress moved deliberatively towards creating a central bank. Before the new central bank was established though, there was another serious financial panic in 1914. So as you can see, this really was a very serious problem for the U.S. economy. So financial stability concerns were a major reason why Congress decided to try to create a central bank in the beginning of the 20th century。

But remember, the other major mission of central banks is economic stability, monetary and economic stability. Now, the monetary history of the United States is pretty complicated. I won't try to go through it all, but in the period after the Civil War towards until World War I and then really all the way into the '30s, the United States was on a gold standard. And as you probably know, a gold standard is at least a partial alternative to a central bank. Now, what is a gold standard? What a gold standard is is it's a monetary system in which the value of the currency is fixed in terms of gold. So for example, by law in the early 20th century, the price of gold was set at $$20 dollars and 67 cents an ounce. So there was a fixed relationship between the dollar and a certain weight of gold. And that in turn helped
nd the Euro can go down. Now, again, some people would argue that's beneficial, but there is at least one problem which is that if there are shocks or changes in the money supply in one country and perhaps even a bad set of policies, other countries that are tied to the currency of that country will also experience some of the effects of that。

So I'll give you a modern example. Today, as you probably know, China ties its currency to the dollar. It's become more flexible lately, but for a long time there's been a close relationship

between the Chinese currency and the U.S. dollar. Now what that means is that if the Fed lowers interest rates and stimulates the U.S. economy because, say, we're in a recession, that means also that essentially monetary policy becomes easier in China as well because interest rates have to be the same in different countries with essentially the same currency. And those low interest rates may not be appropriate for China, and as a result China may experience inflation because it's essentially tied to U.S. monetary policy. So fixed exchange rates between countries tend to transmit both good and bad policies between those countries and take away the independence

that individual countries have to manage their own monetary policy。

Yet another issue with the gold standard has to do with speculative attack. Now normally, a central bank with a gold standard only keeps a fraction of the gold necessary to back the entire money supply. Indeed, the Bank of England was famous for keeping, as Keynes called it, a thin film of gold. The British Central Bank only kept a small amount of gold, and they relied on their credibility to stand by the gold standard under all circumstances to--so that nobody ever challenged them about that issue. But if for whatever reason, if markets lose confidence in your willingness and your commitment to maintaining that gold standard relationship, you can get a speculative attack. This is what happened in 1931 to the British. In 1931, for a lot of good reasons, speculators lost confidence that the British pound would stand gold, so just like a run on the bank, they all brought their pounds to the Bank of England and said, "Give me gold." And it didn't take very long before the Bank of England was out of gold cause they didn't have all the gold they needed to support the money supply and then, there was essentially--they've essentially had to leave the gold standard, so there was a lot of financial volatility created by this attack on the gold standard。

There's a story told that a British official, Treasury official was taking a bath. An aid came running in saying, "We're off the gold standard, we're off the gold standard," and he said, "I didn't know we could do that." [Laughter] But they could, and they had to. They had no choice because there was a speculative attack on the pound. Moreover, and related to this, as we saw in the case of United States, gol
d standard had plenty of financial panics associated with it. So,

financial stability was not always assured by the gold standard. And finally, just one last word on the gold standard, one of the strengths that people cite for the gold standard is that it creates a stable value for the currency. It creates a stable inflation, and that's true over very long periods. But over shorter periods, maybe up to 5 or 10 years, you can actually have a lot of inflation,

rising prices, or deflation, falling prices, in a gold standard. And the reason is that in a gold standard, the amount of money in the economy varies according to things like gold strikes. So for example, if United States, if gold was discovered in California and the amount of gold in the economy goes up, that will cause an inflation, whereas if the economy is growing faster and there's a shortage of gold, that will cause a deflation. So over shorter periods of time, you frequently had both inflations and deflations. Over very long periods of time, decades, prices

were quite stable。

Now this again was a very significant concern in the United States. Here's a famous figure who we can see was a very good public speaker. [Laughter] William Jennings Bryan, 3-time democratic candidate for president. In the latter part of the 19th century, there was a shortage of gold relative to economic growth, and since there wasn't enough gold in some sense, money supply was shrinking relative to the economy, the U.S. economy was experiencing a deflation, that is, prices were gradually falling over this period. Now this caused some problems, and the people who were most concerned about it were farmers and other agriculture-related

occupations. Think about this for a moment. If you're a farmer in Kansas and you have a mortgage with the bank and that mortgage requires, say, a fixed payment of $$20 dollars each month, that amount of money you have to pay is fixed. But how do you pay that, you pay it by growing your crops and selling the crops in market. Now if you have a deflation going on, that means that the prices of your corn or your cotton, or your grain is falling over time, but your payment to the bank stays the same. So a deflation created a grinding pressure on farmers as they saw the prices of their products going down, and as their debt payments remained unchanged. And so, farmers were squeezed by this decline in their crop prices, and they recognized that this deflation was not an accident. The deflation was being caused by the gold standard. And so William Jennings Bryan ran for president, and his principal, his principal platform, principal plank in his platform, was the need to modify the gold standard. In particular, he wanted to add silver to the metallic system so that there would be more money in circulation and more

inflation. But he spoke about this in the usual, very eloquent way of 19th century orators. He said, "You shall not press down
upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." And again, what he was trying to say is that the gold standard is killing honest, hardworking farmers who are trying to make their payments to the bank and find the price of their crops going down over time. So the gold standard also created problems and again was a motivation for the founding of the Federal Reserve. In 1913, finally after all the study, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act which established the Federal Reserve which opened in 1914. Now there's a picture which hangs in the Fed of President Woodrow Wilson signing the Federal Reserve Act in 1914. President Wilson viewed this as his primary most important domestic accomplishment in his first--in his term. So again, why did

they want a central bank? The Federal Reserve Act called on the newly established Fed to do two

things. First, to serve as a lender of last resort and to try to mitigate the panics that banks were experiencing every few years, and secondly to manage the gold standard that is to take the sharp edges off the gold standard to avoid sharp swings in interest rates and other macroeconomic variables. So that was the objective of the Federal Reserve. Now interestingly, the Fed was not the first attempt by Congress to create a central bank. There have been two previous attempts, one of them suggested by Alexander Hamilton, and the second somewhat later in the 19th century. In both cases, Congress let the central bank die and basically the problem was that there was a lot of disagreement between what would today we would call Main Street and Wall Street. The folks on Main Street could include farmers, for example, feared that the central bank would be mainly an instrument of the moneyed interests in New York and Philadelphia and would not represent the entire country, would not be a national central bank, and both the first and the

second attempts at creating a central bank failed for that reason. So Woodrow Wilson had I think a better idea and he tried a different approach, and what he did was, is he created not just a single central bank say in Washington, but he created 12 Federal Reserve banks located at major cities across the country. And so the picture shows the 12 Federal Reserve districts that we still have today, and each one has a Federal Reserve Bank in it, and then a Board of Governors which oversees the whole system is in Washington, D.C. Notice, by the way, how many of the little black dots are to the right. In 1914 most of the economic activity in United States was in the eastern part of the country. Now, of course it's much more even but the reserve banks are in the same locations as they were in 1914. But anyway, the point here, the value of this structure was again creating a central bank where everybody, all parts of the country, would have a voice and where information about all aspects of our national economy would be heard i
netary policy now and about the modern economy, why is there still an argument--some argument, for returning to the gold standard, and is it even possible?

Chairman Bernanke: So the argument I think has two parts. One is the desire to maintain "the value of the dollar." I mean basically it's a desire to have very long run price stability. So, the argument is that paper money is inherently inflationary, so we have a gold standard tool, you won't have deflation. And as I said, that's true to some extent over long periods of time. But from a year to year basis, it's not true and so looking at history is helpful there. The other reason, I think that gold standard advocates want to see return to gold, is that it removes discretion, it doesn't allow the Central Bank to respond with monetary policy, for example to booms and

busts, and the advocates of the gold standard say it's better not to give that flexibility to a central bank. So those are basically the arguments. I think though that the gold standard would not be feasible for both practical reasons and policy reasons. On the practical side, it is just a simple fact there is not enough gold to meet the needs of a global gold standard and achieving that much

gold would be very expensive, cost a lot of resources. But more fundamentally than that is that the world was changed, so the reason the Bank of England could maintain the gold standard even though it had very small number, amount of gold reserves was that everybody knew that they were going to--their first, second, third and fourth priority was staying on gold and that they had no interest in any other policy objective. But once there was concern that Bank of England

might--you know, might not be fully committed, then there was a speculative attack that drove him off gold. Now, economic historians argue that after World War I, after World War I, the labor movements became much stronger and there was a lot more concern about unemployment. Before the 19th century, people don't even measure unemployment and after the World War I,

you begin to get much more attention to unemployment and business cycles. So in a modern world, the commitment to the gold standard would mean that we are swearing that under no circumstances, no matter how bad unemployment gets, are we going to do anything about it using monetary policy. And if investors had 1 percent doubt that we would follow that promise, then they will have varying incentive to bring their cash and take out gold in this and in fact it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we've seen that problem with various kinds of fix exchange rates that have come under attack during financial crisis. So I understand the impulse

but I think if you look at actual history, you'll see that the gold standard didn't work that well and it worked particularly poorly after World War I. Indeed, well I won't go into it, there's a good bit of evidence that the gold stan

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