US Economic History
From colonial extraction to petrodollar hegemony: three centuries of American monetary and economic development
The history of the American economy is not a story of markets discovering their natural equilibrium. It is a story of contested institutional choices -- about who controls money, who benefits from its creation, and whose interests monetary policy is designed to serve. Those contests began before independence and have never fully resolved.
The Colonial Economy
Before independence, American economic life was organized around British mercantile priorities, not colonial ones.
The Bank Wars
Hamilton vs. Jefferson: the foundational American conflict over centralized finance and democratic accountability.
From Bank Wars to the Panic of 1907
A century of monetary disorder, wildcat banking, and the financial crisis that made reform inevitable.
Jekyll Island and the Design of the Fed
In November 1910, seven men met in secret and drafted the legislation that became the Federal Reserve Act.
What Jekyll Island Built Into the System
The structural assumptions embedded at the Fed's founding have shaped a century of monetary policy.
The Great Depression
The gold standard turned a severe recession into a catastrophe. Ten years of mass unemployment followed.
The New Deal
Roosevelt's response reshaped the relationship between government and economy in ways that endured for forty years.
Bretton Woods
The 1944 monetary agreement that made the dollar the world's reserve currency -- and what that meant.
The Nixon Shock
On August 15, 1971, Nixon severed the dollar's link to gold and remade the global monetary order.
The Petrodollar
The 1974 agreement with Saudi Arabia recycled oil revenues into US Treasuries and sustained dollar supremacy.
Stagflation and Volcker
Double-digit inflation, a Fed chairman willing to cause a recession, and the end of the postwar settlement.