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The Fed: Reality Trumps Rhetoric
by Shawn Ritenour
Mises.org
Throughout the existence of the Fed, its officers and intellectual supporters understandably asserted that the government’s movement toward central banking was a most beneficial evolution. In a 1948 issue of The Federal Reserve Bulletin, for example, Fed Chairman Thomas B. McCabe asserted that money production could not manage itself, so we need a central bank such as the Fed that acts for the public interest. Nearly three decades later, the venerable Arthur Burns claimed that the basic assets of the Fed are concern for the general welfare, moral integrity, respect for tested knowledge, and independence of thought.
The alleged benefits from a Fed-managed elastic money stock became the standard justification for the Fed in later propaganda. Again in 1948, Fed Chairman McCabe asserted that a lack of a central bank caused a continual threat of financial panic, but the Fed put an end to this danger — a rather cheeky claim to make only a few years after the Great Depression. Subsequent Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin claimed that the Fed was designed to minimize panics and crises due to irregularities in flow of money supply and make the monetary system function more smoothly, but that a gold standard was too rigid.
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Source: http://financialsurvivalnetwork.com/2015/01/the-fed-reality-trumps-rhetoric/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-fed-reality-trumps-rhetoric
