[NOISE] I've brought here with me here just to give us some inspiration for this review, a couple of books. This one is Oliver Sprig, History of Crises Under the National Banking System, written in 1910. After the 1907 crisis, the National Monetary Commission was created and it commissioned a bunch of books about central banking in other countries and this is one. And Oliver Sprig was good buddies with Alan Young. Oliver Sprig taught banking at Harvard Business School when Alan Young taught in the Arts and Sciences Department. And so this is the evidentiary basis for needing a central bank, the history of crises in the national banking system since the Civil War. This book is called The Federal Reserve System, by H Parker Willis, published in 1923. He was a professor here at Columbia. Professor of Banking at Columbia University. And he was one of the people involved in creating the legislation that created the Fed. And so in 1923 after the war, he wrote it all down to say, I really want people to know what this thing is, this Fed. Because you remember, right after the Fed, the war started and so it didn't really get a chance. So he says, almost a generation of discussion and agitation with fully ten years of earnest effort to devise a system of banking legislation, produced the Federal Reserve Act. The working of the measure under the stimulus of war conditions and subsequent changes in trade and finance has transformed the entire structure of banking and business. Today, the Federal Reserve system stands as the very foundation of American commerce, blah, blah, blah. And yet the reserve system is sharply under attack, both in and out of Congress. There are many who would either disestablish it, or radically modify its constitution. We've been here before, okay? We've been here before. The Fed was under attack by people who thought, end the Fed type people back in 1923. And he was trying to defend it and give it a chance to develop its own system. And Benjamin Strong was inventing open market operations and all of this. They were making it up as they were going along. So this is 1923, and then, this two volume thing. It's called The Federal Reserve System, written by Paul Warburg, who ws this German banker who came to the United States and was very influential in framing the document. But he was on the Board of Governors, the first Board of Governors and he says He's writing this, he's publishing this in 1930. Yeah, 1930, in the McMillan Company. The first draft of this book was prepared at Pasadena in February and March of 1927. I had gone to California for a three months rest, it's nice to be a banker. When the appearance of a series of articles written by Senator Glass subsequently published in a book form under the title An Adventure in Constructive Finance, so Senator Glass was one of the authors of the Fed Reserve Act, okay? And he's writing his memoirs, An Adventure in Constructive Finance. Impelled me to lay down in black and white, my recollections of certain events in the history of banking reform. As this chronicle of the past gradually took form, these recollections give rise to reflections upon the Reserve System's present state, and its future. He's trying to correct the record, he goes on to say. That Glass was not important in creating this. It was all me, and Glass misunderstands it. Anyway, so there's this battle over what the Federal Reserve was about and so forth. And so these are the historical documents that we'll have in front of us to inspire us to great efforts today. This is the sort of thing that, this is the foundation of the knowledge I have about the system. It's historical, it's institutional, it's having read books like this that makes me feel confident in the things that I'm saying to you.