There was not only one depression and one stock market crash
leading up to the creation of the Federal Reserve. The Business
Cycle by Lawrence W. Reed The Great Depression was not the
country's first depression, though it proved to be the longest.
Several others preceded it. In 1819, after three years of
currency inflation caused by the federally chartered Second Bank
of the United States, the economy fell apart. The slump of
1836-37 occurred as the inflationary distortions of the central
bank era were liquidated when President Andrew Jackson prevented
the re-charter of the Second Bank, calling it a "money monster."
In 1857 the economy retrenched after a decade of money and
credit expansion on behalf of state governments that had forced
their debt obligations onto the state banking systems. In 1873,
a post-Civil War downturn followed the excesses of the
government's rampant "greenback" inflation. The Panic and
Depression of 1893-95 hit the country after Congress force-fed
the economy for years with depreciati