Seven Questions for Kevin Warsh, Newly Confirmed as Chairman of the Fed

The Federal Reserve is at the center of the pure paper money system of the United States and the world. As the Fed transitions to a new chairman, it is timely to consider some questions about this remarkable, powerful, dangerous, and allegedly “independent” institution. Here are seven questions for the new chairman, Kevin Warsh, and his colleagues:Do we need a national price fixing committee for interest rates?Answer: No.Nothing is more obvious in free market economics than that having centralized price fixing by the government is a really bad idea. The constant discovery of clearing prices by competitive markets is what is needed. Yet the Fed’s Open Market Committee is a national price fixing committee by another name for one of the most important prices: interest rates. Amazing mistake, if you think about it. Does the Fed know what it’s doing?Answer: No.As the outgoing chairman of the Fed, Jerome Powell wittily and correctly said about the Fed, “We are navigating by the stars under cloudy skies.” So it is, and so it must be. Neither the Fed nor anybody else ever knew or ever can know what the correct interest rates are. To do that they would have to know the future, and the economic future is always uncertain, not only unknown but unknowable. The Fed’s forecasting record is poor because it cannot know what it is really doing. How much money has the Fed lost on its “QE” gamble—and whose money was it?Answer: It has lost more than $1.3 trillion of the taxpayers’ money.The Fed made a gamble on what it called “Quantitative Easing,” or “QE,” described by its chairman at the time, Ben Bernanke, as a “shot in the dark.” It was a macroeconomic gamble that stoked asset price inflations. It was a financial gamble with the Fed’s own earnings and capital.The huge resulting total losses are the sum of three factors. The Fed reported net operating losses of about $220 billion since 2022. In addition, the QE losses wiped out more than $300 billion in profits the Fed made by issuing currency and holding interest-free deposits from the Treasury.So quantitative easing’s operating losses exceed $500 billion. On top of that, QE has resulted in mark-to-market losses of $844 billion. In sum, the more than $1.3 trillion in losses mean that the costs will be borne by the taxpayers and suggest that the Fed has lost the entire $47 billion capital of its commercial bank shareholders about 27 times over.Does the Federal Reserve Act assign the Fed a goal of “price stability”?Answer: No.“Price stability” is a tricky term that means, according to the Fed, perpetual inflation at some rate it chooses. It means that overall prices always rise. That is not what the Federal Reserve Act says. The Act assigns to the Fed an objective of “stable prices,” a clear term. It means prices that are stable. In other words, it means average inflation of approximately zero. The Fed was rhetorically clever to use “price stability” in all its presentations when it decided to pursue perpetual inflation, since it obviously was not pursuing stable prices.Should the Fed have a monopoly in American money?Answer: No. As suggested by Friedrich Hayek in “Competition in Currency,” an essay now canonical among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, to control a central bank’s urge to impose inflation on the people, one could create competition in currency. Then the people could use the money they believe will best hold its value. The same essay shows that what Hayek really wanted was a renewed monetary role for gold to evolve from this competition.Could there be a renewed monetary role for gold?Answer: We should try to develop one. The Fed might start by owning some gold to diversify its assets. Today, unlike most major central banks, it owns exactly zero gold and so has missed out on the great gold rally, which was really the great depreciation of the Federal Reserve dollar — by 99 percent against gold since 1971. Various American states have projects to make gold a legal tender, which might allow 100 percent gold-backed electronic currencies to compete with paper dollars. Should the Federal Reserve be “independent”?Answer: No.No part of the government in any branch should be an independent fiefdom. Fundamental to our Constitutional Republic is that every part of the government must be a part of our system of checks and balances. In the Fed’s case, this means there needs to be much enhanced accountability to the Congress.

Seven Questions for Kevin Warsh, Newly Confirmed as Chairman of the Fed

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