The Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened for business on November 16, 1914, under the leadership of
Benjamin Strong Jr., who had previously been president of the
Bankers Trust company. He led the bank until his death in 1928. Strong became the executive officer (then called the "governor"—today, the term would be "president"). As the leader of the Federal Reserve's largest and most powerful district bank, Strong became a dominant force in U.S. monetary and banking affairs. One biographer has termed him the "de facto leader of the entire Federal Reserve System". This was not only because of Strong's abilities, but also because the
central board's powers were ambiguous and, for the most part, limited to supervisory and regulatory functions under the 1913
Federal Reserve Act because many Americans were antagonistic to centralized control. When the United States entered
World War I, Strong was a major force behind the campaigns to fund the war effort via bonds owned primarily by U.S. citizens. This enabled the United States to avoid many of the post-war financial problems of the European belligerents. Strong gradually recognized the importance of
open market operation, or purchases and sales of government
securities, as a means of managing the quantity of money in the U.S. economy and thus affecting interest rates. This was particularly important at the time because gold had flooded into the United States during and after World War I. Thus, its gold-backed currency was well-protected, but prices had been pushed up substantially by the currency expansion due to the
gold standard-imposed expansion of currency. In 1922, Strong unofficially scrapped the gold standard and instead began aggressively pursuing open market operations as a means of stabilizing domestic prices and thus internal economic stability. Thus, he began the Federal Reserve's practice of buying and selling government securities as monetary policy.
John Maynard Keynes, a prominent British economist who had previously not questioned the gold standard, used Strong's activities as an example of how a
central bank could manage a nation's economy without the gold standard in his book
A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923). To quote one authority: It was Strong more than anyone else who invented the modern central banker. When we watch ... [central bankers of today] describe how they are seeking to strike the right balance between economic growth and price stability, it is the ghost of Benjamin Strong who hovers above him. It all sounds quite prosaically obvious now, but in 1922 it was a radical departure from more than two hundred years of central banking history. Strong's policy of maintaining price levels during the 1920s through open market operation and his willingness to maintain the
liquidity of banks during panics have been praised by
monetarists and harshly criticized by
Austrian economists. With the European economic turmoil of the 1920s, Strong's influence became worldwide. He was a strong supporter of European efforts to return to the gold standard and economic stability. Strong's new monetary policies not only stabilized U.S. prices, they encouraged both U.S. and world trade by helping to stabilize European currencies and finances. However, with virtually no inflation, interest rates were low and the U.S. economy and corporate profits surged, fueling the stock market increases of the late 1920s. This worried him, but he also felt he had no choice because the low interest rates were helping Europeans (particularly the
United Kingdom) in their effort to return to the gold standard. Economic historian
Charles P. Kindleberger states that Strong was one of the few U.S. policymakers interested in the troubled financial affairs of Europe in the 1920s, and that had he not died in 1928, just a year before the
Great Depression, he might have been able to maintain stability in the international financial system. A public
competition for the design of the building was held and the architectural firm of
York and Sawyer submitted the winning design. The bank moved to the new
Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building in 1924. ==Responsibilities==