This crude comparison does not of course prove that the Federal Reserve System failed to contribute to monetary stability. Perhaps the problems that the System had to handle were more severe than those that impinged on the earlier monetary structure. Perhaps those problems would have produced an even greater degree of monetary instability under the earlier arrangements. But the crude comparison should at least give the reader pause before he takes for granted, as is so often done, that an agency as long established, as powerful, as pervasive as the Federal Reserve System is performing a
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