Sir;Meaningless as melting clocks
By Eileen M. Debold
July 14, 2003
Dali's surreal world, where hard objects become inexplicably limp,
describes not only the Greenspan Fed, but also the Volcker Fed and the
Arthur Burns Fed. These chairmen have all engaged in what Dali would call
"the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling" since the day the US jettisoned
the gold standard.
Central bankers, says Mr. Baker, insist that deflation is a theoretical
impossibility in a world of fiat money because if the economy needs
inflation "the central bank can just turn on the taps and produce some".
Not true. Like Dali's melting clocks, that idea has lost all meaning,
as it is a throwback to a gold-standard era. That world was vaporized
in 1971.
Today, loans create deposits, and the Fed's role is to provide the reserves
demanded by the banking system. In a fiat money world, a central bank
simply administers an overnight rate of interest by substituting one form of
money for another (bank reserves for government debt or vice versa.)
Inflation, deflation and the value of the currency are a function of fiscal,
not monetary policy.
This has been the case for more than 30 years, yet central bankers remain
in a time warp, still insisting that they have some control over money and
the economy. Mr. Baker might have questioned whether taxpayers' money
ought to be spent on unelected central bankers whose ideas are as soft as
overripe cheese.
Eileen M. Debold
Piscataway, NJ 08854
US
posted July 14, 2003