Happy 100th Birthday to the Federal Reserve!

How have they done?  

  

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…oh.

8 thoughts on “Happy 100th Birthday to the Federal Reserve!

  1. Your graph shows [quite convincingly] that the cpi has exploded since roughly 1970. On the other hand Brandon and Dr. P will rush to tell you that the US standard of living has blossomed in a wondrous fashion in that same ~40 year period. Should we be concerned about the cpi?

  2. What are you actually saying, Prof. Terry? Why be so cryptic? Are you saying that the US standard of living has not (NOT) so blossomed in the period of interest?

    • http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2013conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=485

      To be fair, I haven’t read the paper yet, I have been too busy to write anything substantial and noticed the date was coming up so just thought I would chime in. Anyone else who would like to outline the problems with the Reserve vis a vis the declining value of the dollar please jump in since I probably won’t be around much until after Christmas.

  3. As Henry Hazlitt has famously said (paraphrasing, here): we will never know what might have been. As much as Americans grew out of poverty, how many more might have if the dollar had not lost so much value? How many more lives would have been better, had the dollar remained strong?

    Of course there are many more variables than the central bank. We have to think about predatory lending that was mandated by the Feds with the CRA, the tax laws that made it a punishment to build things in America, the erroneous and ridiculous regulations made by unaccountable bureaucrats…on and on.

    Even with those, we’ll never know what might have been. I think the CPI is just one small indicator that we know something better might have been, but it’s been squelched.

  4. On the topic of currency, fiat or otherwise…. 🙂
    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html

    If nothing else I’m going to tuck away this quote for future reference:
    “…I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).”

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