The Mises Institute monthly, free with membership
May 1996
Volume 14, Number 5
The Federal Reserve is the most powerful yet least questioned of all Washington institutions.
It
can make or break elections, bail out entire governments, send the stock market to the
stratosphere, or bankrupt whole industries. Yet it operates with less oversight than the CIA.
In the past, politicians have only bowed and scraped when the Fed chairman testified before
the
Congressional committees. But that may change. The Fed may find itself on the hotseat after 79
years.
The Government Accounting Office released a report on the Fed just as Alan Greenspan was
seeking Senate confirmation for his third term. The report pulled back the curtain, just a smidgen,
on the Fed's notorious secrecy. Now some Senators are gearing up to give the Fed the what-for.
Among other revelations in the report is the fact that the Fed holds a heretofore secret
"contingency fund"--that is, a slush fund--totaling $3.7 billion. It comes from money that the Fed
has skimmed off the revenues gained from its open-market operations. Those revenues were
supposed to be turned over to the Treasury.
And that's far from the only slush sluicing through the marble halls of the Fed's temple on
Constitution Ave. From 1988 to 1994, spending on the Fed's lush lifestyle grew at twice the rate
of inflation. There may be other such interesting facts, but we can't know for sure. The Fed has
so
far evaded a full-blown audit.
Mr. Greenspan protests the suggestion that the Fed is wasting taxpayer dollars. He points out
that
Congress doesn't appropriate any money to fund the Fed's operations. He's right in a narrow
sense, but he's also counting on widespread ignorance of the Fed's operations to forestall further
grilling.
The truth is the Fed doesn't need our taxes any more than a counterfeiter needs to rob the
local
gas station. The central bank can effectively print all the money it needs. And as the "lender of
last resort," the Fed even controls the value definition of the dollar itself.
Just to get their juices flowing, Senators should do some reading in money and banking.
Ideally,
they would memorize Murray N. Rothbard's The Case Against the Fed, or show our
anti-Fed film
on the Senate's tv system. Central banking is a relatively new invention, and no one but a money
socialist would say it has a good record.
In its never-ending quest to expand money and credit--a real contraction of money virtually
never
occurs--the Fed can lower the rate it charges member banks for loans, it can manipulate reserve
requirements, or, most notoriously, it can buy Treasury securities on the open market.
It's this last action that proves so profitable. The Fed purchases Treasury securities--either
directly or through favorite brokerage houses--and holds this debt as an asset. Working through
its branch and member banks, it pyramids loans on top of these securities. The creditworthiness
of the U.S. government--whose balance sheet would otherwise suggest Chapter 7--is entirely due
to this power of the Fed.
The Fed can either be a minor or major buyer in the market, or it can play the key role in
persuading foreign governments to buy and hold U.S. debt, thereby helping finance the U.S.
deficit. In any case, this power is what creates the symbiotic relationship between the banking
system and the government that makes a mockery of the Fed's alleged independence.
The real oddity--and this is where the power to counterfeit comes in--is where the Fed gets
the
money to purchase these debt securities. It creates it out of thin air, a trick made ever easier as the
current paper money system replaced the restrictive gold standard.
If anyone tries this trick in the private sector, he's in the pokey. Look at the hysteria over the
Montana Freemen. The U.S. military has considered bombing whole countries that are rumored
to be producing phony dollars. The government says its new and surprisingly ugly $100 bill is
necessary to stop counterfeiting. I call all this cracking down on the competition.
Now to the Fed's just-discovered $3.7 billion slush fund. It represents a small slice of the
profits
the central bank derives from exacting interest payments on the debt it holds. And who pays that
interest? You and me, in the form of tax dollars that Congress allocates year by year. At the end
of the year, the Fed gives some back and keeps the rest.
The original argument for creating the Fed was that it would eliminate banking crises,
defined as
economic downturns that cause banks to go belly-up and depositors to lose their money (and
without doing away with fraudulent but extremely profitable fractional reserves). Well, after
1913, the recessions increased in frequency, the government became vastly bigger, and the dollar
lost about 97 percent of its value. In one way or another, depositors have paid out more than
ever.
The Fed's fingerprints are all over these trends. Every new dollar created by the Fed's
operations--all other things being equal--waters down the value of the existing dollars in the
economy. And an ever-cheaper dollar redistributes money from savers to debtors, and from the
tax-paying middle class to the banks and government contractors that can spend the fresh money
before prices rise.
If you doubt it, look at the private finances of one Fed board member, Lawrence Lindsey. He
staged a tantrum when "Toys R Us" rejected his credit card application. But the Wall Street
Journal reported that he's as leveraged as the government itself. Is he expecting inflation to
pay
his debts off?
Meanwhile, the Fed is becoming more aggressive as the nation's monetary mismanager. Who
was it, after the peso fell, that burned up the phone lines demanding that Mexico be bailed out?
Rush Limbaugh even got a call. Why, it was Alan Greenspan, who now seeks to be rewarded
with another term, and resents any suggestion that the Fed's unbridled power is not entirely
justified.
We hear that inflation is low, but look at the long-term trends. The dollar has lost about 75%
of
its value since Richard Nixon eliminated the last vestiges of the gold standard in 1971. Even at
the present rate of inflation--and who believes that will last?--overall prices will be double when
today's newborns enter the workforce, also laying the groundwork for future downturns.
We can't stop these trends by new and better appointments to the Fed. Differences among
inflation "hawks" and "doves" are minute compared with the overriding institutional bias toward
cheaper money, interest-rate manipulation, and brazen bailouts. And when Fed
governors--including Mr. Greenspan--descend from the clouds to tell us their theories, they
invariably resort to dumbed-down, discredited Keynesian doctrine about the trade-off between
inflation and unemployment.
If we want to know why living standards are still falling, that curtain needs to be pulled back
even more. If we want to stop the fall, we need to throw a monkey wrench into the money
machine. The solution is a hundred-percent gold dollar, which would keep the government small,
our money sound, and our economy stable. Best of all, under a gold standard, Lawrence Lindsey
would be forced to pay his toy bills with his own money.
--------------------------------------------
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president and founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Back