The author simply doesn’t understand that it is the central bank that is causing the problem in the first place. The public were told in 1913 that the purpose of the central bank was to eliminate recessions. Most historians don’t know very much economics and just take that claim at face value. It was just a bit of political sloganeering though. The real reason for the central bank was to establish a banking cartel which could enforce a uniform rate of bank credit expansion such that consumers wouldn’t be able to judge one bank against another. In return for creating this crooked institution the government got a guaranteed taker for all its debt.
Thanks for the responses. I was confident of your perspective before asking the question, but wanted feedback nonetheless because I don’t speak econom-ese. But I do speak common sense and the more I read, the more irritated I got.
Among other things, the author (John Steele Gordon) attached every bank failure in US history to Jefferson’s opposition (he included a banking timeline), which started some big ball rolling, like free enterprise has nothing to do with business success. He criticized private individual banks regulated on the state level and considered them doomed to fail because they were outside a federal umbrella. His general implication was that if Jefferson had listened to Alexander Hamilton in the first place, the US would never have had a bank failure. He dismissed Jefferson’s quotes that indicate his concern for the average farmer, saying in effect that he was a hypocrite because he himself was a rich elitist.
The main gist of the article seemed to be government control = stability, and let’s just ignore the fact that we operate under a capitalist system that has as its very foundation the potential for both success and failure.