"You can take it to the bank."

Here are some neat posters from the 1920s extolling the protective role of the newish Federal Reserve System, from the archives of the San Francisco Fed and currently featured on Liberty Street Economics, the blog of the New York Fed.

America's third and lasting stab at creating a central bank occurred in 1913, prompted by the banking "panics" of 1873, 1893 and 1907. Time was, legendary financier J.P. Morgan was a one-man central bank, able to arrest panics simply by hauling Wall Street peers into his office and ordering them to inject liquidity into a then primitive system.

But by the 1907 panic, the populist distrust that caused the dismantling of the previous two central banks - most famously by President Andrew Jackson - had been redirected from a government feared of over-control of the markets to high-rolling financiers for whom economic stability was, to put it kindly, not a priority in their ardent pursuit of vast private wealth. (Sound familiar?)

Mindful that the short-lived First and Second Banks of the United States had failed to win public favour, the Federal Reserve System went on a p.r. campaign to win popular appeal and avoid the fate of the two earlier central banks. (The Federal Reserve Board, headed by Ben Bernanke, is is the system's presidentially appointed Board of Governors; in addition, there are 12 Federal Reserve Banks located in America's major cities.) The posters shown here were displayed in the front windows of America's then-12,000 or so indpendently owned and operated banks as a reassurance against future panics ruinous to depositors.

The notion that an idea was so sound that "you can take it to the bank" had its origins in this era.

H/T: Big Picture. 

 

Comments

[Wascally Wabbit]

I'm trying to imagine how today's Federal Reserve would be postered.
A large printing press with dollar bills flying out on wings perhaps?