Biography
Young was a messenger for a bank at the age of eight. He then worked as assistant cashier and joined the Citizens National Bank as vice president in 1913. From 1919 to 1927 he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis before becoming chairman of the of the Federal Reserve Board. From 1930 to 1942 he served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. After his resignation, he changed to become chairman of the Merchants National Bank and later chairman of American Woolen Company.
During his term in office as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board there was confrontation between the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under George L. Harrison of how to curb speculation that led inter alia to the stock market boom of the late 1920s. The Board was in favor of putting "direct pressure" on the lending member banks while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wanted to raise the discount rate. The Board under Young disapproved this step, however Young himself was not fully convinced that the policy of using pressure would work and refused to sign the 1929 Annual Report of the Board because it contained parts favorable to this policy.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, memoirs to serve for a history, which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)