“What if you were appointed to head the Fed? In your first week on the job, what would you do?”
The question was not exactly serious. Neither was the answer.
“We’d call in sick.”
A Return to Gold
Drought, old age, traffic congestion, meanness, purple drink, bad taste, rap, suburbs, cancer, government, Hillary Clinton, restaurant music, shorts, Facebook, obesity – there are a lot of things wrong in the world.
And most of them are not easily put right.
But there are some problems that could be solved overnight. Economic and financial problems, for example, solve themselves… if you let them.
Almost all the macro-money wounds suffered by the modern world are self-inflicted. Central banks and treasury departments around the world keep shooting themselves in the foot. But rather than stop manipulating the system… they buy another pair of shoes.
If we were miraculously appointed by President Trump to run the Fed, our first act would be to put the gun down.
We would announce that, henceforth, anyone waiting for the next rate hike would have to wait a long time. Because we wouldn’t be making any rate hikes… or rate cuts either. Instead, interest rates would have to take care of themselves. Lenders and borrowers would set their own rates.
But what about if banks got into trouble?
Ah… we’d take care of that too. We’d point out that the Fed would no longer lend to them in an emergency.
Our announcement: “To any bank that runs out of money: Drop dead.”
Then, we would put the entire Fed balance sheet – the more than $4 trillion in dodgy bonds it bought over the last eight years – up for sale.
And we would send layoff notices to the entire staff… telling them to clean out their desks, admonishing them that henceforth they would have to seek honest employment or try to land a job on Wall Street.
Had we the power, we would take one further step: We would declare that Americans could use whatever currency they wanted, that the dollar would once again be exchangeable for a fixed quantity of gold, and that the U.S. Treasury would accept any major currency – including bitcoin – in payment of taxes.
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