federal reserve

When will Paul Krugman adapt to reality?

Several major central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, have set a goal of two percent price inflation. The problem is, what central bankers are targeting is a phantom that does not exist.

On August 11, 2017, the Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article on the Fed, raising a question of its storage of gold.

Have you wondered why stocks like Apple, Microsoft and Google continue to make big gains in the U.S. indexes such as the Dow-Jones Industrials? These are the kind of big, successful companies that central banks favor.

For more than two hundred years, practically all of even the most free market advocates have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets.

By inserting itself into the operations of businesses large and small, government makes itself a factor business owners have to consider when making virtually all their decisions.

For decades and decades in Washington, D.C., members of both political Parties have time and again thrown at us the Groucho Marx quote: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The federal government’s war against a popular digital asset exchange company offers a lesson in why consumers and business owners should have more freedom to pay as they wish.

Last week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Janet Yellen was awarded the Radcliffe Medal at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. At a lunch in Yellen’s honor, Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the institute, praised the Fed chair’s “steadfast commitment to robust growth” and the way the she “steers our economy,” guided by the philosophy of her Yale mentor, Keynesian economist James Tobin.

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.

When is the price of some marketable good or service at or near zero? When either the supply of it is so plentiful that virtually any demand, no matter how great, can be satisfied. Or when no matter how large or small the supply of it may be, people’s demand for it is so low that nobody is willing to practically pay anything for it.

For over a decade, now, the American economy has been on an economic rollercoaster, of an economic boom between 2003 and 2008, followed by a severe economic downturn, and with a historically slow and weak recovery starting in 2009 up to the present.

Financial markets in the United States and around the world are all waiting with “bated breath” for when the Federal Reserve modifies its “easy money” policy and starts to raise interest rates. No one, however, asks a simple question: Why is the American central bank in the interest rate setting business?