Bernanke Rules?
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has outlined “The Fed’s Exit Strategy.” He tells the reader how the central bank will avoid an inflation of historic proportions resulting from all the money and credit it has injected into the economy. All of the strategies he outlines are technically feasible ways for the Fed to implement monetary restraint.
The op-ed has an air of a classroom exercise, however, rather than a practical central-bank strategy. Much of the article is devoted to explaining how the Fed can now pay interest on reserves, and how it could raise that interest rate so as to dissuade commercial banks from lending the reserves out. It could do that, but what would that rate need to be in order to meet a private bank’s threshold rate of return in normal economic times?
More importantly, the Fed has never lacked the technical tools to combat inflation. What it has so often lacked is the will to make tough decisions. And, quite frankly, it does not possess the information needed to fine-tune the economy in the way Chairman Bernanke imagines (a point made by Milton Friedman many years ago). Lack of will and lack of information combine to keep the Fed behind the curve. Its policy was too easy after 2001, and so it fueled the housing boom. It was late to recognize the turn in housing and the economy, and its policy was then too tight. If past is prologue, it will be late to implement its exit strategy.
The Fed Chairman has presented a laundry list of policy tools. What investors need is some assurance that the right tools will be used at the right moment. The mere promise of a policymaker to do the right thing has little credibility. There is no monetary rule in place, only the rule of a man.
Bernie Madoff and Government Fraud
In an op-ed Chris Edwards and I wrote for National Review Online yesterday, we shed light on the $100 billion or more in government subsidies pilfered by recipients through fraud and abuse:
Every year, criminals and cheats pilfer over $100 billion — that’s $40 billion more than Bernie Madoff scammed off his investors — in federal benefits to which they are not legally entitled. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, and many other programs are targets for looting.
Chris and I focused on fraud and abuse perpetrated by the recipients of taxpayer largesse, and Bernie Madoff made for a good comparison. But as the great economist and Cato adjunct scholar Robert Higgs also pointed out yesterday, “Bernie Madoff Was Only a Petty Crook Compared with Uncle Sam.” Typically, Higgs doesn’t mince words when it comes to comparisons between private and public Ponzi schemes:
Madoff, in contrast to the government, carried out his fraud in a civilized way: he merely misrepresented what he was doing, purporting to invest his clients’ money and to obtain a high rate of return on these investments. People dealt with him voluntarily. Those who suspected something was fishy did not do business with him, and some people went so far as to give substantial information to the SEC to show that Madoff’s business had to be fraudulent (which information the SEC ignored for years on end, of course).
The leaders of the U.S. government have carried out their Social Security fraud—essentially a Ponzi scheme, in substance exactly the same as Madoff’s scheme—since 1935. . . . The U.S. government, however, does not bother to claim any prowess in investing the money it forces people to surrender to its scheme. It admits that the ‘client’s’ return is now close to zero (varying a bit according to the client’s age and other factors). Nor does it carry out its admitted Ponzi scheme in a civilized way. Not only is participation in the scheme involuntary, but the government threatens violence against anyone who fails to participate as it commands him. Thus, the government operates its Ponzi scheme in a markedly more thuggish manner than Bernie would ever have dreamed of. He might have been a crook, but he was not a thug.
New Video Explains Why Soak-the-Rich Tax Increases Are Misguided
The Obama Administration is proposing higher taxes on just about everyone and everything, but one common theme is that most of the tax increases are being portrayed as ways of fleecing the so-called rich. This new video, narrated by yours truly, provides five reasons why the economy will suffer if entrepreneurs and investors are hit with punitive taxes.
As always, any feedback on message and style would be appreciated.
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