Product details
- ISBN 9780226851266
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A revelatory history of how the Federal Reserve finances American power.
Central banks, we are told, are economic superpowers that must remain independent of modern democratic governments. The US Federal Reserve’s presumed insulation from politics affords it autonomy and credibility to control inflation and promote economic stability—or so the story goes.
In The Fiscal Fed, Will Bateman offers a deeply sourced, empirical history that shows the Fed’s primary function is actually, and has always been, fiscal—sustaining the market for Treasury borrowing that makes up the difference between federal spending and federal revenue. Bateman combs Fed meeting transcripts, staff notes, financial accounts, and legal documents to trace loans and public-debt purchases since the central bank’s founding. The result is a milestone work that reveals how, for most of the Fed’s history, its transactions were aimed at government financing—either by providing cheap credit to close budget gaps or by manipulating yields on government debt. The Fed’s support for government finance is a feature, not a bug, of American economic institutions.
Will Bateman is a professor at the Australian National University, College of Law, Governance and Policy. His research has been published in the Modern Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies,Review of International Political Economy, and he is the author of Public Finance and Parliamentary Constitutionalism.
