federal reserve

What we now know to have been one of the worst economic and financial crises of the post-World War II period began about ten years ago in 2007.

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

For a century now, American law has recognized the freedom of the parties to a contract to agree to submit disputes to arbitration.

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.

For years the Federal Reserve and many other central banks around the world have declared that a key element of monetary policy is the targeting of a two percent rate of annual price inflation.

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?”

Host Donny Kendal is going lone wolf in episode #66 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Cato Institute, the Mises Institute, and the Heartland Institute.

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.

There is no way to describe current Federal Reserve policy other than as monetary confusion and misdirection. In a nutshell, Janet Yellen and the other members of the Fed’s Board of Governors have no idea what to do. Do they raise certain interest rates over which they have some direct influence? Do they keep them at their current rock bottom levels, as they have for the last six years?

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.

There is little that happens in society in general and the market economy in particular that most on the political “left” do not think needs more government intervention, regulation, and redistribution to make “better.”

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?

Since the economic crisis of 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve – America’s central bank – has expanded the money supply in the banking system by over $4 trillion, and has manipulated key interest rates to keep them so artificially low that when adjusted for price inflation, several of them have been actually negative. We should not be surprised if this is setting the stage for another serious economic crisis down the road.