Instead of endeavoring to influence a market-determined federal funds rate by reducing or increasing the supply of bank reserves, the Fed now adjusts a pair of rates determined solely by its own administrative decrees, while conducting open-market operations without any particular reference to these rate adjustments.
A stable inflation rate is no guarantee of overall economic stability.
Free banking money guru George Selgin opines.
This talk examines the development, operation and performance of monetary systems in the absence of government intervention.
How currency monopolies promote booms and busts, and having a lender of last resort leads to moral hazard and financial instability.
“Monetary control” refers to the various procedures and devices the Fed and other central banks employ in their attempts to regulate the overall availability of liquid assets, and through it the general course of spending, prices, and employment, in the economies they oversee.
I regard any need for last-resort lending as reflecting, not the inherent shortcomings of private financial markets, but the debilitating effects of misguided regulatory interference with the free development of those markets.
The sad reality is that the battle for monetary freedom has for some time now taken the form of a rearguard action, aimed at resisting as much as possible ever-increasing government incursions into an ever-shrinking realm of financial choice.
Financial systems, like economies generally, are organic entities. They must be allowed to flourish in a natural way.
The record of past "free banking" systems, in which paper currency consisted of competitively supplied banknotes, contradicts the widespread belief that central banks play an essential part in promoting financial stability....
The multiplier’s significance to monetary policy is, or used to be, straightforward: it indicated the quantity of additional bank deposits that monetary authorities could expect to see banks produce in response to any increment of new bank reserves supplied them by means of either open-market operations or direct central bank loans.
There is, after all, at least one impulse among humans that’s more deep-seated than their “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” I mean, of course, their propensity to let themselves be thoroughly bamboozled.
Free banking and monetary rules were rival ideas for guarding against abuses of discretionary monetary policy, today they are properly seen as complementary schemes, one for improving the performance of the banking system, the other for reforming the base-money regime.
On the Fed’s “instruments of monetary control,” which include devices for regulating the total quantity of bank reserves and circulating Federal Reserve notes, and also for regulating the quantity of bank deposits and other forms of privately-created money that will be supported by any given quantity of bank reserves.
A better alternative, if only it can somehow be achieved, or at least approximated, is a monetary system that adjusts the stock of money in response to changes in the demand for money balances, thereby reducing the need for changes in the general level of prices.
What sort of monetary policy or regime best avoids the costs of having too much or too little money?
How can a central bank manage a quantity without being certain just how to define, let alone measure, that quantity? How is it possible for the quantity of money supplied to differ from the quantity demanded? When those things do differ, how can one tell? Finally, just what does “the demand for money” mean?
What, exactly, is “monetary policy” about? Why is there such a thing at all? What should we want to accomplish by it — and what should we not try to accomplish?
Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts. On one they face champions of central banking and managed money. On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking. Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being unimportant, in part because the battle there is being fought against people who generally favor free markets, who might have been expected to join rather than to oppose our cause.
The gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. But these things don’t excuse the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that “barbarous relic.”
It isn’t clear that the Fed has brought any substantial improvement in macroeconomic stability.
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