Reining In the Fed
“We know all too well that when it comes to bureaucratic mission creep, it’s incredibly difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. That’s why we must work to right the Fed’s course starting now. Its roles in fighting recessions and preventing financial panics are too important to be hijacked by partisanship.” ~ Alexander William Salter
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Problems of Federal Reserve Policy—and How to Solve Them
“To stabilize the economy, informed citizens must study the faults of discretionary central banking and call for reforms to protect against them. ‘Money and the Rule of Law’ accomplishes the first goal. The second is up to us.” ~ Thomas L. Hogan
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Is the Fed Paying Banks Not to Lend?
“The evidence shows that banks treated excess reserves as a profitable alternative to loans. High rates of IOER caused them to increase reserve holdings and decrease their loan allocations. The Fed was indeed paying banks not to lend.” ~ Thomas L. Hogan
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Why Do Inflation Expectations Matter?
“Powell is telegraphing to the market that he hears their concerns about inflation. We will have to wait through the next several months to learn whether or not investors will be convinced.” ~ James L. Caton
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The Success of Climate Mainstreaming
“Mainstreaming any important topic means to single-mindedly put everyone’s efforts in one basket and ignore all other important issues. That was my mistake ten years ago: not seeing the bigger picture. Now the world has caught up, keen on making that same mistake, central banks more so than most. Don Quixote de la Mancha sends his regards.” ~ Joakim Book
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To Lean, Clean, or Reign Supreme
“After a decade or more of economic and financial events that put central banks under heavy strain – financial collapse, a slow and timid recovery, the pandemic – strange things are again amiss in financial markets. Broda and Druckenmiller are right to say that ‘the Fed seems to be fighting the last battle.’ Ironically, so are they: we’re back in the lean-or-clean debate of twenty years ago.” ~ Joakim Book
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War Of Words Over Inflation Stirs Questions for the Fed
“Does it make sense, for a nation founded on the notion of individual liberty, equality under the law, and personal property rights, to allow a government agency to manipulate the value of the currency used by its citizens? Would it be better to have a stable monetary foundation to facilitate free-market outcomes, rather than empower the Federal Reserve to distort interest rates and dilute dollars in the service of government policy?” ~ Judy Shelton
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Monetary Control: Central Banks Today
“The Fed’s operating framework systematically tends towards the abuse of life, liberty, and property. If we want to fix this, we need to take a much closer look at the relationship between money and freedom. Only if we understand this relationship, philosophically, economically, and historically, will we be in a position to fix what’s gone wrong with our monetary institutions.” ~ Alexander W. Salter
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The Rise of Bitcoin
“The blockchain technology at bitcoin’s core provides a new and fundamentally different way to process payments. It relies on neither decentralized nor centralized clearing. Instead, it processes transactions over a distributed network. And, by solving the double spending problem without recourse to a trusted third party, it has the potential to offer a degree of financial privacy comparable to decentralized payment mechanisms like cash.” ~ William J. Luther
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GosFed Looming at the Fed?
“It’s easy to see why the comrades of Gosbank showed so little dissent. Say, or think, the wrong thing in the Soviet Union, and you risked a one-way ticket to Siberia. What in the world is GosFed’s excuse?” ~The New York Sun
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Is the US Economy a Virtual Reality?
“It’s impossible to know precisely what the future portends for all these unprecedented policy shocks over the last year, from money supply and spending bonanzas to lockdowns to sky-high debt accumulation. But because a thing called cause-and-effect still operates in this world – we do not live in virtual reality – it seems wise to look at the seemingly great aggregate data with a gravely skeptical eye. We might be in the midst of the calm before the real storm hits.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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Make No Mistake: Programmable Digital Currencies Are Weaponizable Money
“Money, in its most basic form, is an irreplaceable facilitator of economic calculation and a social instrument making cooperation possible on a global scale. Policies of the sort which programmable digital currencies bring into the realm of possibility potentially turn those on their head, introducing new possibilities for intentional––and systematic––coercion.” ~ Peter C. Earle
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