A year into Chairman Bernanke’s campaign to make the Federal Reserve more transparent it turns out the confusion is greater than ever. This is according to no less a Bernankean institution than the New York Times. It reports in that the bearded banker-in-chief has “tried to speak more clearly and more frequently than his predecessors.” It notes he has “lectured” college pupils, “met with members of the military,” and “held quarterly news conferences.” But as he gets ready for his fifth press conference, due Wednesday, “there are,” the Times reports, “reasons to doubt that the efforts are increasing public understanding of monetary policy.”

Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you. More than a year ago we issued our first editorial predicting that all this talk would amount to no good. It was called “The Verbal Dollar.” We wrote of the “tradition of silence among central banks” that goes back at least to the Bank of England. We quoted the famous remark of the Bank of England’s one-time deputy governor to Lord Keynes, who, at a hearing, had pressed him on the bank’s failure to explain its policies. Came the reply: “To defend ourselves is somewhat akin to a lady starting to defend her virtue.”

We followed that editorial with another, earlier this year, on the Fed’s plan to publish its own predictions of what it would do. We called it “The New Fiat Money,” meaning a currency backed with hot air. “Wouldn’t it be wiser for the Fed to stop its infernal yakking?” we asked. “What is its yakkety-yakketa doing for the poor saps forced by American law to accept its scrip?” But the Fed keeps plunging ahead, and now the New York Times is quoting Diane Swonk, chief economist at the Chicago investment firm of Mesirow Financial, as saying in the wake of the Fed’s new “transparency” the “economists and analysts who are paid to predict and translate the Fed’s actions and pronouncements for investors say that demand for their services has only increased.” Quoth she: “It’s been one of the most amazing things.”

Back in January, when another truckload of Fed transcripts was dumped on the long-suffering analysts, we issued an editorial called “Secrets of the Fed.”  The editorial noted that the Fed was starting to remind people of Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, William McAdoo.  James Grant of the Interest Rate Observer had just reminded us of McAdoo’s penchant, during the 1924 campaign, for putting his foot in his mouth, until one of his supporters finally said to him: “What your friends want out of you is silence — and damn little of that.” We argued then that the Federal Reserve would be better off without the all the words that pour from its transcripts, press conferences, and minutes. We called its words “a poor excuse for money.” Let the Fed stand mute, we wrote, so that we can discover its policies the way we discover the properties of a black hole — not by the light that comes out, for none does, but by the behavior of nearby objects. It is the best policy to follow until we can have a restoration of the one, true, transparent money, which is gold.