I've been mulling over Leon Surette's remark that the Fed is a consortium
of private banks.  This is not quite accurate, since the fed governors,
central and regional, all serve at the pleasure of elected officials. So
to be optimistic, the populace controls monetary policy, albeit
indirectly.  To say the Fed is a private banking consortium is a bit like
saying the FCC is a private communications consortium or that airports are
private airline consortiums.

The FCC comparison is important in Pound's case, because it was William
Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney at the Scopes Trial, the first
ever publically broadcast, who finally convinced Woodrow Wilson to support
the original Fed legislation (Alec Marsh, by the way, incorrectly states
in his book that Thaddeus Pound supported the Fed, when in fact TCP died
before the Fed was created--Thaddeus did, however, support the softening
of the money supply that the Fed represented). It was also Bryan who
inspired Pound's first published poem, about the battle of the gold and
silver standards in 1896.

I'll cover some of this, and its relation to Imagism, at the MSA in
Philadelphia, if the panel is accepted.

By the way, I found the recent article in the New Yorker on Alan Greenspan
quite instructive on how different Fed chairmen have had different
impacts.  Which shows I'm no economist.

Jonathan Gill
Columbia University