Congress and the Dollar

The resignation of Frederic Mishkin from the board of governors of the Federal Reserve will provide the Congress another opportunity to step back and take a look at the question of our currency. Not since the Fed was restructured in 1936 have there been more vacancies on the Fed board, which normally has seven members but which, when Mr. Mishkin’s retirement takes effect at the end of August, will have but four, one of whom is unconfirmed. The president has already nominated Elizabeth Duke and Larry Klane, but the Senate has been in no rush to confirm. No doubt it hopes to run out the clock so that a President Clinton or Obama will make new selections.This would be a good time for the Congress to dig down deep and think about what it wants to do in respect of its powers under Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution. That is the section in which the founders of America delegated to the Congress the power to, among other things, “coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures.” There has been a lot of debate over the years about what the Founders meant by that language, but it is hard to imagine they meant anything like what has happened to our currency in the years of the Bush presidency, indeed in the years of Ben Bernanke’s tenure as Fed chairman.In that period, the value of the dollar has collapsed to an astonishing degree — falling to one 883rd of an ounce of gold from a 265th of an ounce of gold when Mr. Bush acceded and from 568th of an ounce of gold when Mr. Bernanke was confirmed to succeed Alan Greenspan. We find it hard to believe the Founders would have been anything but scandalized by this — or they wouldn’t have included the power to coin money and regulate its value in the same sentence in which they delegated to the Congress the power to fix the standard of weights and measures. Surely the Founders understood the role of money as a measure of value.“The soundness of a central bank varies inversely with the breadth of its mandate,” James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, has written. The degree to which the dollar has fallen is a measure not of the Fed’s incompetence but of its hubris. It would be a Herculean task for any single institution to promote price stability as measured by a currency that has no defined value in the law. But this is only one of the tasks Congress has, in the course of abandoning its constitutional authority, set before the Fed. The other is to promote maximum employment, a task that was given to it in 1978 with the enactment of what is called the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.It was one of the classic blunders of a decade, the 1970s, known for its failures. The original Fed mandate, decreed by Congress in 1913, was to “foster an elastic currency.” Then, the value of a dollar was legally defined by the weight of gold, into which it could be lawfully exchanged. The dollar so defined, its stability took care of itself. Prices tended to decline in peacetime and to rise in wartime but remained fairly constant over the span of years without the help of any maestro. The Fed’s job was to make an ostensibly rigid currency malleable to the needs of a fluctuating economy.Today’s Fed has become a kind of central planning body. It fixes an interest rate, the so-called federal funds rate. Just how these wise men and wise women know which rate to fix is, to us, a mystery. But there’s no mystery about the nature of the dollar. It has no defined value. No need, these days, to worry about a lack of monetary elasticity. The money supply just keeps growing. Had the Founders anticipated our modern monetary system, they might have delegated to Congress the power to coin money in a sentence that dealt with intellectual property rights instead of weights and measures.***The real hard money purists don’t even credit the Congress’s authority to authorize the federal government to issue paper notes of any kind. They are driven fairly to distraction by the fact that nowhere in the law is a dollar defined at all. So how could it particularly matter whether the board of governors of the Federal Reserve is filled or unfilled? When it was filled, it failed to define the dollar or defend its soundness. All the more reason, we say, for the Congress to seize on the pending nominations as a way to revisit these most basic questions and use the powers given to it by the Founders — and no others — to reform our nation’s monetary system. We’re of the view that an enormous portion of the problems before our nation — the credit crisis, the commodities crisis, the transfer of enormous wealth to the oil-producing tyrannies — these kinds of troubles grow from the failure of the Congress to establish a monetary system that sends accurate price signals, and nowhere should this be of greater concern than here in the financial capital of the world.

Congress and the Dollar

Congress and the Dollar

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