While federal financial intermediation in widely accepted, federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. Federal financial intermediation began during WW I through the War Finance Corporation (WFC). When the Wilson administration wanted to end the program after the war, one man, Republican Eugene Meyer fought to extend the life and expand role of the WFC. During the Great Contraction, Meyer, now Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, worked to temporarily revive the War Finance Corporation in the form of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). However inadvertent to Meyer’s intentions, the RFC and related programs and agencies became the vehicles for a vastly expanded role for direct federal government finance during the New Deal years and to the present.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Delaware, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
06-09.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: