Fedophilia

Although the movement to “End the Fed” has a considerable popular following, only a very tiny number of economists—our illustrious contributors amongst them—take the possibility seriously. For the rest, the Federal Reserve System is, not an ideal currency system to be sure (for who would dare to call it that?), but, implicitly at least, the best of all possible systems. And while there’s no shortage of proposals for reforming it almost all of them call only for mere tinkering. Tough though their love may be, the fact remains that most economists are stuck on the Fed.

This veneration of the Fed has long struck me as perverse. Its record can hardly be said, after all, to supply grounds for complacency, much less for the belief that no other system could possibly do better. (Indeed that record, as Bill Lastrapes, Larry White and I have shown, even makes it difficult to claim that the Fed has improved upon the evidently flawed National Currency system it replaced.) Further, as the Fed is both a monopoly and a central planning agency, one would expect economists’ general opposition to monopolies and to central planning, as informed by their welfare theorems and by the general collapse of socialism, to prejudice them against it. Yet instead of ganging up to look into market-based alternatives to the Fed, the profession for the most part has relegated such inquiries to its fringe.

Why? The question warrants an answer from those of us who insist that exploring alternatives to the Fed is worthwhile, if only to counter people’s natural but nevertheless mistaken inclination to assume that the rest of the profession isn’t interested in such alternatives because it has already carefully considered—and rejected—them.

It’s tempting to blame Fedophilia, or what Larry White calls “status quo” bias in monetary research, on the Fed’s direct influence upon the economics profession. According to White, in 2005 the Fed employed about 27 percent more full-time macro- and monetary (including banking) economists than the top 50 US academic economics departments combined, while disseminating much of their research gratis through various in-house publications or as working papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, despite a thorough review of such publications White could not find “a single Fed-published article that calls for eliminating, privatizing, or even restructuring the Fed.” That professional monetary economics journals are not much better may in turn reflect the fact, also documented by White, that Fed-affiliated economists also dominate those journals’ editorial boards.

But I doubt that a reluctance to bite the hand that feeds them is the only, or even the most important, reason why most economists seldom question the Fed’s desirability. Another reason, I suppose, is their desire to distance themselves from…kooks. Let’s face it: more than a few persons who’d like to “End the Fed” want to do so because they think the Rothschilds run it, that it had JFK killed because he planned to revive the silver dollar, and that the basic plan for it was hatched not by the Congressional Committee in charge of monetary reform but by a cabal of Wall Street bankers at a top-secret meeting on Jekyll Island.

Oh, wait: the last claim is actually true.  …

Continue reading at FreeBanking.org…

image: flickr.com/nicmcphee

2012-12-06 14:22:31

Source: http://www.soundmoneyproject.org/?p=8872