Marriner Eccles (1890–1977)
Who They Were
Marriner Eccles (1890-1977) was an American banker from Utah who became one of the most consequential figures in the history of the Federal Reserve. Appointed to lead the Board in 1934, he had watched his own banks survive the Depression and brought to Washington a conviction that the decentralised system designed in 1913 had failed catastrophically between 1929 and 1933. He is widely regarded as the architect of the modern Federal Reserve. Eccles served through the Second World War, during which the Fed pegged Treasury yields to hold down the government's wartime borrowing costs, and remained in office until 1948. Near the end of his tenure he clashed openly with the Treasury over that bond-yield peg, a fight his successors resolved with the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. The Board's headquarters in Washington is named the Eccles Building in his honour.
Key Contributions
Eccles reshaped the structure of American central banking.
- He drove the Banking Act of 1935, which produced the framework that survives today: the seven members of the newly renamed Board of Governors plus five Reserve Bank presidents, giving Washington a permanent voting majority on the Federal Open Market Committee.
- The Act settled a long fight over whether monetary policy would be made in New York or in the capital, shifting decisive authority to Washington and ensuring no Reserve Bank could opt out of the committee's decisions.
- During the war he oversaw the pegging of Treasury yields to keep government borrowing cheap, and his later resistance to continuing that peg set the stage for the 1951 Accord.
His centralising reforms gave the institution the durable shape it retains.
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