Federal Reserve

A private-public hybrid printing the world's money, born in secret on an island.

Neither federal nor a reserve, runs the oldest joke in the literature. The 1910 drafting session on Jekyll Island is confirmed history — first names only on the train, a duck hunt as cover, one-sixth of the world's wealth in one rail car. What emerged three years later was a hybrid no civics class can diagram: privately owned regional banks, a public board, and the power to conjure the unit everything else is priced in.