“How the Fed lost its cred” is the headline this morning over Gillian Tett’s column in the London Financial Times. The rising FT scribe is praising a new book by President Reagan’s former budget director, David Stockman. The book argues that at the heart of “The Great Deformation,” which is the title of the tome, is, in the Fed, a “rogue central bank that has abandoned every vestige of sound money.” Ms. Tett, who has been traveling a good bit around America, reports that Mr. Stockman’s view “is creeping more and more into mainstream debate.”

Ms. Tett insists that “most ordinary Americans,” as she calls us, “do not really understand how quantitative easing does – or does not – work, nor are they articulating Stockman’s fury that America left the gold standard.” She writes, nonetheless, that on her travels she “was struck by how many people – be they economists, businessmen or cab drivers – volunteered a sense of unease about the central bank.” Our own view is different. We think that Americans do understand how quantitative easing does not work and that this is precisely why Mr. Stockman’s view is creeping more into mainstream debate.

What arrests us about Ms. Tett’s coverage is the refreshment it offers from the editorial line of the Financial Times. The FT announced its opposition to any talk of the gold standard back in 2010, when its editors picked up their own paper to discover — to their horror — that on its own op-ed page no less of an establishment figure than Robert Zoellick, then president of the World Bank, had suggested it might be time to return gold to a role in the international monetary system. The FT turned around and issued an editorial denouncing the very op ed piece it had just run.

We wrote about it at the time in “Zoellick Tossed Under the Bus.” Ms. Tett emerged as a dissenter from the FT’s stodginess a few months ago, when she came out with a devastating column on the “rising uncertainty over the Fed’s effectiveness.” She warned against a third round of quantitative easing. Her piece followed a column by the FT’s editorial page warhorse Martin Wolf about how Chairman Bernanke “deserves praise for bold and ethical move.” Her latest column followed by a week an FT editorial denouncing moves in Congress to repeal Humphrey Hawkins.

That is the law that assigned the Fed the task not only of stabilizing the value of the dollar but of also keeping the unemployment rate down. The reform effort is being led on the Capitol Hill by the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas, who wants a Centennial Monetary Commission to be established on the double-jubilee of the Federal Reserve. In addition to the prudence of such a commission — can once a century be too often for the Fed’s creator to look at its handiwork? — it will be quite a spectacle to watch those Europeans who don’t read Ms. Tett try to keep up.