Can the government tell the Fed what to do? If Congress and the president are agreed about what to do, yes. If there is disagreement over monetary policy — and there usually is — then the Fed does pretty much what it wants.
The worst of Bernanke's statements came in 2006, near the zenith of the housing bubble. This was the era of the subprime mortgage, the interest-only mortgage, the no-documentation loan, and the heyday of mortgage-backed securities.
If we wish to culminate the fall of the Berlin wall and get rid of the real socialism that still remains in the monetary and credit sector, a priority would be the elimination of central banks, which would be rendered unnecessary as lenders of last resort if a 100 percent reserve reform were introduced.
A so-called lowering of "real" interest rates by means of money pumping is basically an act of a diversion of real wealth from wealth generators to various nonproductive activities. Hence, contrary to popular thinking, the Fed's attempt to lower the real interest rate in fact leads to a higher real interest rate.
The justification given for "QE2," another round of quantitative easing, is of course the threat of deflation. But if we actually look for ourselves, we see that prices are not falling — not that it would be bad if they were.
Bernanke's remarks were long and ponderous, Fedspeak plus excerpts from a typical intermediate-macroeconomics textbook. One thing this newest piece of Fedspeak surely won't do is give us maximum employment and price stability.
Paul Krugman is despairing of late, because a growing number of mainstream economists are adopting (versions of) Austrian business-cycle theory. The most recent convert is Minneapolis Fed president Narayana Kocherlakota.
Krugman dismissed the idea that Keynesianism was best suited for totalitarianism and he ignored my inquiry about the fact that the mess we are in is precisely because the US government has pursued Keynesian policies for the past eight decades.
Recorded at the Ludwig von Mises Institute; Auburn, Alabama; 8 October 2010.
