Here’s how the London Financial Times reacts to the first press conference of the new Fed chairwoman, Janet Yellen: “Within seconds of perhaps accidentally suggesting that interest rates would rise sooner than anticipated, the Dow Jones dropped almost one percent. The markets recovered a little of their lost ground later on. But her slip further muddied what has proved to be an almost meaninglessly vague revision of the Fed’s forward guidance policy. Central bank communications ought to be clearer than this. When markets have so little to go on, they will seize on whatever driftwood passes by.”

Well, sic transit gloria mundi, as is said. One minute you’re the most powerful woman in the world, featured on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The $16 Trillion Woman.” The next minute your utterances are likened in the Financial Times to flotsam. Forgive us for sticking with the point, but this is just a feature of the era of the verbal dollar. Our money, once backed by gold and silver, is now backed with driftwood. It bobs up and down on the great ocean of finance. People remark on its interesting and ever-changing shape. It floats near shore. It drifts away, as the currents may carry it.

Let us say that we don’t blame Mrs. Yellen for this. She may be chairwoman of the Fed, but she is not its architect and the Fed is not ultimately responsible for the dollar. That is the United States Congress, which, in the early 1970s, invested in the idea of fiat money to a degree that would have just shocked the Founders of America down to the ground. Our national malaise has dragged on now as long as the first years of the Great Depression. And what happened back then? The country did not recover. It plunged into the depression within a depression.

It’s not our intention to predict the same fate here, though neither would we rule it out. What we do predict is that historians will conclude that fiat money was during the long travail of the Great Recession a drag on the American economy. We do not blame Mrs. Yellen and her colleagues. But neither do we look to them for the solution. We blame Congress, to which the constitutional monetary powers are granted. “It was,” the FT insists, “always going to be difficult to find an exit.” Not, it neglects to mention, according to Ben Bernanke, who famously declared “We could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if we have to.” Those words turned out to have been but some of the driftwood that was passing by.