The Fed

Neither the Fed nor Wall Street can undo the ill effects of past monetary expansions, says Frank Shostak.

With its latest move to boost interest rates, the Fed is again clouding its role as the sole source of economy-wide price increases.

Frank Shostak rebuts the claim that markets are driven to unsustainable highs by waves of investor enthusiasm. Actually, the Fed itself is the real culprit.

Like a man who douses a large pile of rags with gasoline and then warns of a fire hazard, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has begun issuing dire warnings of impending inflation after orchestrating several years of explosive monetary growth.

The meltdown on Wall Street can't be corrected through intervention; if it is headed down further, it needs to run its course.

He talks like an old Keynesian but has early  intellectual ties to the Austrian School, once calling the Fed's creation "a historic disaster." 

The oil price, the stock market, the yield curve, and other factors suggest the boom may be fading. But several quick steps to free markets would shorten the pain. 

Greenspan recently said he is not sure what the money supply is. But money is like any commodity: it has a supply and it can be counted.

The unexpected inversion has led to wild speculations about the cause and solution, but only the Austrian economists name the real culprit.

Two articles debunking the Fed's "con game," written on Greenspan's first appointment to the Fed and his later reappointment.