Indeed, the lessons learned from financial panics, notably the crisis of 1907, were a major catalyst in the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The original goal of the Fed, then, was to preserve financial stability.
According to one of the authors of the Federal Reserve Act, Robert Latham Owen, the Fed was established to "provide a means by which periodic panics which shake the American Republic and do it enormous injury shall be stopped. "4 As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff note, “there is no mention of a price stability mandate in the original version of the legislation.