Crises and De- or Re-Generation

This Chapter begins the task of designing a fully updated 1913-style Fed, with retained 1935-style characteristics, along lines suggested by the historical and theoretical work of the prior chapters. This task is greatly aided both by the fact that ‘we’ve done this before,’ and by the fact that we even began an incipient update like that I design here during the Covid pandemic, in the forms of the Municipal Liquidity Facility (‘MLF’) and the Main Street Lending (‘MSL’) programs introduced in 2020. While flawed in their execution owing to our having vested responsibility for them in only two Federal Reserve District Banks—the New York and Boston Feds—in conception these plans were promising, as countless white papers, opinion pieces, and Fed and municipal advisory calls that I put out over 2020–21 made clear. There is no reason, the Chapter accordingly argues, that we can’t get those things right now. The ‘Spread Fed’ plan that I accordingly blueprint in this Chapter also updates the 1913 distribution of Fed District Banks in a manner that reflects changes our regional economies have undergone over the past century.