#cryptocurrency

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the cost of Thanksgiving dinner this year is up fourteen percent, not counting the sixty percent hike it costs to buy the gas to get to grandma’s.  This of course only compounds the political challenge facing the Biden Administration when it tries to confirm its choices for the next iteration of the Federal Reserve Board.  However, while inflation is indeed a lightning rod, the macroeconomic building below it is also strung with perilous wiring.   This is because the Fed – not Congress – is now a fiscal powerhouse, exacerbating inequality and the slow growth that goes with it no matter the trillions Democrats hope to throw around.

The Fed would have it that there is a pure monetary-policy realm premised on independent macroeconomic thinking while the fiscal hurly-burly is responsible for anything macroeconomic that the Fed does not or cannot achieve.  The purity derives, or so the Fed likes to say, from its ascetic “dual” mandate, which allows the Fed only to seek “maximum” employment and price “stability.”  But, as both my book and a new paper detail, the black-letter law of the Fed’s express mandate in fact includes a third injunction:  “moderate long-term interest rates.”

Further, The Federal Reserve Act is not the only provision of federal law stipulating the Federal Reserve’s goals.  The Fed is also covered by the overall statutory injunction to all federal agencies under the Full Employment Act to advance the “general welfare” in concert with an …