Marriner Stoddard Eccles

Last updated
Marriner Eccles
Marriner Eccles.jpg
7th Chairman of the Federal Reserve
In office
November 15, 1934 February 3, 1948
President Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Deputy John Thomas
Ronald Ransom
Preceded by Eugene Black
Succeeded by Thomas McCabe
Personal details
Born(1890-09-09)September 9, 1890
Logan, Utah, U.S.
Died December 18, 1977(1977-12-18) (aged 87)
Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
Political party Republican [1]

Marriner Stoddard Eccles (September 9, 1890 December 18, 1977) was a U.S. banker, economist, and member and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Economist professional in the social science discipline of economics

An economist is a practitioner in the social science discipline of economics.

Contents

Marriner Stoddard Eccles was known during his lifetime chiefly as having been the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He has been remembered for having anticipated and supporting the theories of John Maynard Keynes relative to "inadequate aggregate spending" in the economy which appeared during his tenure. [2] As Eccles wrote in his memoir Beckoning Frontiers (1951):

John Maynard Keynes English economist

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Widely considered the founder of modern macroeconomics, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. [3]

Biography

Born in Logan, Utah to David and Ellen (Stoddard) Eccles, he was educated at public schools of Baker, Oregon and attended Brigham Young College and served a Latter-day Saint mission to Scotland. After his mission, while working in a family enterprise in Blacksmith Fork Canyon, he learned of the untimely death of his father, David Eccles. With great skill and tenacity, he was able to reorganize and consolidate the assets of his father's industrial conglomerate and banking network. Eccles expanded the banking interests into a large western chain of banks called Eccles-Browning Affiliated Banks. He was a millionaire by age 22. The company withstood several bank runs during the Great Depression and, as a leading banker, Eccles became involved with the creation of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In 1913, he married the former May Campbell Young. The couple did not have a happy marriage, caused partly by Eccles' lack of attention towards her, and although they were legally married 35 years until their divorce in 1948, they separated soon after the marriage and lived largely separate lives. [4] After a brief stint at the Treasury Department and with the support of treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Eccles was appointed by President Roosevelt as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Eccles was reappointed chair in 1936, 1940, and 1944 and served until 1948. [5] In February 1944, Roosevelt appointed Eccles for another 14-year term on the board and Eccles stayed on the board until 1951, when he resigned a few months after the 1951 Accord. [2] Eccles had also participated in post-World War II Bretton Woods negotiations that created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Logan, Utah City in Utah, United States

Logan City, commonly referred to Logan, is a city in Cache County, Utah, United States. The 2010 census recorded the population was 48,174, with an estimated population of 48,997 in 2014. By 2050 the population of Logan is expected to double. Logan is the county seat of Cache County and the principal city of the Logan metropolitan area, which includes Cache County and Franklin County, Idaho. The Logan metropolitan area contained 125,442 people as of the 2010 census. and was declared by Morgan Quitno in 2005 and 2007 to be the safest in the United States in those years. Logan also is the location of the main campus of Utah State University.

Brigham Young College

Brigham Young College was a college and high school in Logan, Utah. It was founded by Brigham Young on 6 August 1877, 23 days before his death. He deeded several acres of land to a board of trustees for the development of a college. This was just two years after he founded Brigham Young Academy in Provo in 1875, which became Brigham Young University in 1903.

Scotland Country in Europe, part of the United Kingdom

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Sharing a border with England to the southeast, Scotland is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, by the North Sea to the northeast and by the Irish Sea to the south. In addition to the mainland, situated on the northern third of the island of Great Britain, Scotland has over 790 islands, including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.

Eccles retired to Utah in 1951 to run his companies and write his memoirs, titled Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. He further consolidated industrial and family assets, finally organizing a series of foundations representing assets that he had managed for various family members. These foundations have served Utah and the Intermountain West in support of educational, artistic, humanitarian, and scientific activities. He died in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1977 and was entombed in the Larkin Sunset Lawn Mausoleum.

Utah A state of the United States of America

Utah is a state in the western United States. It became the 45th state admitted to the U.S. on January 4, 1896. Utah is the 13th-largest by area, 31st-most-populous, and 10th-least-densely populated of the 50 United States. Utah has a population of more than 3 million according to the Census estimate for July 1, 2016. Urban development is mostly concentrated in two areas: the Wasatch Front in the north-central part of the state, which contains approximately 2.5 million people; and Washington County in Southern Utah, with over 160,000 residents. Utah is bordered by Colorado to the east, Wyoming to the northeast, Idaho to the north, Arizona to the south, and Nevada to the west. It also touches a corner of New Mexico in the southeast.

Intermountain West geographic and geological region of the western United States

The Intermountain West, or Intermountain Region, is a geographic and geological region of the Western United States. It is located between the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada on the west.

Legacy

Eccles was and is seen as an early proponent of demand stimulus projects to fend off the ravages of the Great Depression. Eccles was famously rebuked by Congresswoman Jessie Sumner (R, IL) during a House of Representatives hearing on the increasingly liberal policies of the Roosevelt administration and the Federal Reserve, when she said, "you just love socialism." [6] He became known as a defender of Keynesian ideas, though his ideas predated Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In that respect, he is considered by some to have seen monetary policy having secondary importance and that as a result he allowed the Federal Reserve to be sublimated to the interests of the Treasury. In this view, the Federal Reserve after 1935 acquired new instruments to command monetary policy, but it did not change its behavior significantly. [2] Further, his defense of the Federal Reserve-Treasury accord in 1951 is sometimes seen as a reversal of his previous policy stances.[ citation needed ]

Great Depression 20th-century worldwide economic depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late-1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the world's economy can decline.

Jessie Sumner American politician

Jessie Sumner was a U.S. Representative from Illinois.

Republican Party (United States) Major political party in the United States

The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major political parties in the United States; the other is its historic rival, the Democratic Party.

The Eccles Building that houses the headquarters of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. was named after Eccles in 1982. The naming was a component of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act lead-sponsored by Senator Jake Garn (R-UT) and Congressman Fernand St. Germain (D, RI). [7]

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References

  1. http://www.centerforfinancialstability.org/bw2014/bw_eccles.pdf
  2. 1 2 3 Timberlake, Richard, "The Tale of Another Chairman: ... [T]he legacy of W.M. Martin and Marriner Eccles, former Fed chairmen", The Region (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis magazine), June 1999. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
  3. Eccles, Marriner S. Hyman, Sydney, ed. Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 76. ASIN   B0006DBTXI.
  4. Hyman, Sidney (1976). Marriner S. Eccles, private entrepreneur and public servant. Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
  5. "Membership of the Board ..., 1914-Present: Appointive Members" Archived 2012-02-18 at the Wayback Machine ., FRB webpage. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
  6. Woods, Randall Bennett, A changing of the guard: Anglo-American relations, 1941-1946 (The University of North Carolina Press 1990) ISBN   978-0807818770.
  7. "Public Law 97-320" . Retrieved 2009-01-26.

Further reading

Government offices
Preceded by
Eugene Black
Chair of the Federal Reserve
1934–1948
Succeeded by
Thomas McCabe