United Liberty

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux responds to Ben Bernanke’s editorial from the Washington Post:

I had to down an extra mug of coffee this morning to be certain that I read your op-ed in today’s Washington Post correctly.  Sure enough, you claim to be worried about a recent House-committee vote to, as you say, “repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence.”

Ummm….  What guided Fed “policy” over the past couple of years if not short-term political influence?

Working hand-in-glove with the political branches, you now have the Fed performing activities – such as direct lending to what, in an April 2009 speech, you called “ultimate borrowers and major investors” – that are utterly outside of the Fed’s traditional role.

As my colleague and celebrated monetary historian Larry White wrote earlier this year, “The Fed’s new activities deserve to be called a bailout program because they seek to channel credit selectively at below-market interest rates, or purchase assets at above-market prices, in hopes of rescuing, or enhancing profits for, favored sets of financial institutions.  The Fed’s new lending facilities are not parts of a central bank’s traditional ‘lender of last resort’ role.”

Sorry, Mr. Bernanke, any independence that the Fed might have once had from “short-term political influence” has already been trampled to death – chiefly by you.

Boudreaux hits the same point I made yesterday after reading Bernanke’s screed. Everything the Federal Reserve has done has been for political gain, not based out of this non-existent “independence” that Bernanke claims to want to keep intact.