http://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdfThe early history (start at page 47-179) is pretty engaging. Eventually it starts reading like the bible though (around the time the Federal Reserve was created):
The secret meeting
of a handful of top bankers at the Jekyll Island Club in
November 1910 that framed the prototype of the Federal
Reserve Act was held at a resort facility provided by J.P. Morgan
himself. The Federal Reserve, in its first two decades, contained
two loci of power: the main one was the head, then called the
governor, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; of lesser
importance was the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. The
governor of the New York Fed from the beginning until his
death in 1928, was Benjamin Strong, who had spent his entire
working life in the Morgan ambit. He was a vice president of the
Bankers Trust Company, established by the Morgans to engage
in the new and lucrative trust business; and his best friends in
the world were his mentor and neighbor, the powerful Morgan
partner Henry P. Davison, as well as two other Morgan partners,
Dwight Morrow and Thomas W. Lamont. So highly
trusted was Strong in the Morgan circle that he was brought in
to be the personal auditor of J. Pierpont Morgan, Sr., during the
panic of 1907.
