Before the Fed

Glenn Reynolds points, presumably approvingly, to Erik Voorhees' TCS Daily piece on "The Record of the Federal Reserve." From all of which one might get the impression that pre-Fed 19th century America was blissfully free of financial and economic problems. Not quite so. And notably, most of these crises occurred long after the Fed's precursors, the First and Second Banks of the United States, had been driven out of existence by anti-finance populists.