The Great Pretenders: 50th Anniversary of Hayek’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Is Marked — and What an Apt Moment

Published in The New York Sun.

The economic sage saw that the attempts of central bankers to control the markets is based on a ‘pretense of knowledge.’

This is the 50th anniversary of Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize Lecture, “The Pretense of Knowledge.” In his brilliant presentation, which applies particularly to central banks and their yearning to be economic philosopher-kings, Hayek explained the inherent limits of economics and the inevitable failure of trying to make it a predictive mathematical science. 

This was nicely ironic, since the formal name of the award he was receiving is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences,” which celebrates both the “economics is science” idea and the world’s oldest central bank. “Economics is history trying to be physics,” a Wall Street friend told me years ago. He might equally have said, “It is philosophy trying to be physics.” 

As Hayek maintained, in the attempt to be physics — to be used for top-down control by central banks — economics has not, but more importantly, cannot succeed. In 1974, Hayek pointed out that “the serious threat of accelerating inflation,” which became the disastrous Great Inflation of that decade, “has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged.”

Among the things they got wrong was the “Phillips Curve” economic theory that inflation would bring lower unemployment. “The dominant ‘macro-economic theory,’” Hayek predicted, “is likely to make later large-scale unemployment inevitable.”Indeed, the decade ended with simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment. 

Said Hayek, expressing the contrasting theory: “Unemployment indicates that the structure of relative prices and wages has been distorted (usually by monopolistic or government price fixing).” What are central banks but monopolists of the paper currency and a government committee to fix prices (interest rates). 

The Federal Reserve once again demonstrated its power to distort relative prices and credit allocation through its purchase of $2.7 trillion in mortgage securities. That vast monetization of mortgages stoked the second great house price inflation of the 21st century and succeeded in making houses unaffordable for large numbers of Americans, once the abnormally low mortgage interest rates the Fed created went back to normal.

It’s obvious when you think about it, but societies of human beings are not mechanisms with mathematical laws governing their behavior.Instead they are, in Hayek’s term, “phenomena of organized complexity,” fundamentally different in nature from a physical system. They have a different “manner in which the individual elements are connected to each other.” In short, they are connected by minds, and ideas are causal forces in their behavior.

Acting human beings in a society or a market are always looking ahead, anticipating what the actions of the central bank or other parts of the government will be, trying to influence others, changing their beliefs, strategizing, trying to bluff or mislead opponents, forming expectations in response to each other’s expectations. 

The resulting reality is marked by deep recursiveness, reflexivity, and uncertainty. It represents “a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer or to any other single brain.” This knowledge so dispersed is “the source of the superiority of the market order,” Hayek said. It is also the source of the poor record of central bank forecasts, the checkered history of central banking in general, and the impossibility of making economics into physics.

So pity the Federal Reserve governors and presidents who must meet to fix prices as the Federal Open Market Committee.All of them must know in their hearts, each one, that they do not and cannot know the economic and financial future. With 50 more years of institutional experience since Hayek spoke at the Nobel Prize ceremony, they must know that economics is not and cannot be a mathematically predictive science. 

Yet they are forced to make forecasts and guesses while they cannot know what the results will be. “All the world’s a stage,” no doubt, and the Fed cannot avoid being on the stage, and the show must go on. What, though, do the actors in this show really think? Let us hope they have taken to heart Hayek’s lesson that the “insuperable limits to knowledge” ought to teach humility, so that central bankers remain skeptical about their own forced guessing. 

What if, in the end, central bankers believe in the “pretense of knowledge” of their own press releases and flatter themselves that they really are in possession of the scientific, mathematical power to manipulate everybody else for their own good? Hayek ended his great lecture by warning against the danger of this “fatal striving to control society,” which produces tyrannical behavior.

The Federal Reserve plunges into the mortgage market and takes a bath

Published in Housing Finance International Journal.

The most important central bank in the world, the Federal Reserve, owned on September 30, 2024, the staggering sum of $2.3 trillion in mortgage securities, making it by far the biggest investor in the “agency MBS” market which dominates U.S. housing finance. These are the mortgage securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, which total $9.3 trillion. Thus, the central bank owns 25% of the total relevant market, a massive concentration of interest rate and market risk. How has the Fed done on this investment?

The Fed’s mortgage securities portfolio had, as of September 30, a mark-to-market loss of $315 billion, or more than 7 times its stated total capital of $43 billion. The average yield on its mortgage securities portfolio is only 2.2%, while its deposits are costing it 4.65%, for a negative spread on these investments of 2.45%. This means the Fed has an annualized operating loss on its mortgages of $56 billion, equal to a cash loss per year of 130% of its stated total capital. (The Fed is in addition losing money on its portfolio of long-term Treasury bonds.) The underlying mortgages of the Fed’s mortgage securities are primarily 30-year fixed-rate loans, so they have a long time yet to run. In this respect, the Fed looks just like the biggest 1980s-style savings and loan in history. It is quite amusing to think about what Federal Reserve examiners would say to any regulated bank which ran such risk and produced such outcomes!

Moreover, the Fed must transfer most of any profits it makes to the U.S. Treasury, so when the Fed has losses, its losses are also losses to the Treasury and costs to the taxpayers, imposed on them without legislation or Congressional approval. The Fed’s losses increase the government deficit and the government’s debt. As the provocative financial observer Wolf Richter has written, we are “in the era of the money-losing Fed.” The U.S. has never been in such an era before.

In the process of making these losing investments, the Fed greatly distorted the U.S. housing market. Its purchases of mortgage securities with newly created money, or the monetization of mortgages, resulted in a rapid expansion of abnormally cheap mortgage credit, driving the interest rates on 30-year fixed rate mortgages to below 3%, and fueling a rapid acceleration in house prices which has made them unaffordable to large segments of the American population. This was the Second U.S. Housing Bubble of the still young 21st century.

Many people, including me, thought that when U.S. mortgage interest rates inevitably went back to normal levels of 5%-6% or more, average U.S. house prices would fall. They did fall a little, but then started back up. With the standard U.S. 30-year mortgage now costing 6.8%, U.S. house prices nonetheless went up about 4% over the last 12 months.

The most common theory to explain this surprising outcome is that the lucky borrowers of 3% mortgages with the rate fixed for 30 years don’t want to lose the large financial advantage of their abnormally cheap debt by moving, so they disproportionately stay in their houses, thereby reducing the normal supply of houses available for sale and holding up house prices. If this be true, it is another striking source of distortion in the housing market by the Fed.

Quoting Wolf Richter again: “If [house price] charts look absurd it’s because the housing market has become absurd. Housing market charts should never ever look like this. They’re documenting the crazy distortions triggered by the Fed’s monetary policies.” I believe Wolf is correct about this.

Does a huge position in mortgage securities belong on the balance sheet of the U.S. central bank? An authoritative Federal Reserve study of what assets the Fed might invest in, in addition to Treasury securities, is Alternative Instruments for Open Market and Discount Window Operations (2002), written by an expert Federal Reserve System Study Group. This careful study articulated as two of its essential principles that the Fed should:

“Structure its portfolio and undertake its activities so as to minimize their effect on relative asset values and credit allocation within the private sector.”

“Manage its portfolio to be adequately compensated for risks and to maintain sufficient liquidity in its portfolio to conduct potentially large actions on short notice.”

It is apparent that the Fed’s mortgage investments have violated both these principles.

As for the first, they had a major effect on relative asset values, pushing the price of houses up at double-digit annual rates. And they were a massive allocation of credit by the central bank to a particular sector within the private economy, namely housing.

Regarding the second principle, instead of being adequately compensated for its risks, the Fed is suffering, as discussed above, operating and market value losses on its mortgage investments far greater than its capital. As for liquidity, the Fed can’t get out of its mortgage position in any short term—the position is too big relative to the market. Selling it would entail realizing the portfolio’s market value deficit, thus turning paper losses into cash losses.

It is not a practical possibility for the Fed to liquidate its mortgage portfolio on short notice. If it did manage to sell, at least $315 billion in new cash losses would have to be reported in its profit and loss statement. Adding these to the $210 billion in operating losses it has already reported, that would bring its total cash losses to well over half a trillion dollars. Recall that this is also an increase in the federal deficit and the federal debt. Such losses would not only be an embarrassment to the Fed, but might trigger Congressional attention it doesn’t want.

Worse, the Fed would not be able to unload its mortgage securities for as much as its fair value estimate. Trying to quickly sell its massive position would drive the market prices down against it, causing a loss much greater than $315 billion--indeed it might crash the mortgage-backed securities market. Even the announcement that the Fed planned to sell its securities gradually over time would probably lower MBS prices and thereby increase mortgage interest rates—hardly a welcome political outcome.

So it looks like the Fed will have to just hold its losing mortgage securities until the underlying 30-year mortgages slowly mature over time, as “the era of the money-losing Fed” continues. It does not appear that anyone, including the new Trump Administration, can change this outcome.

Looking further forward, the troublesome results of the Federal Reserve’s mortgage investing experiments will certainly provide good material for future historians and theorists of central banking and housing finance.

Letter: Double standards add insult to depositors’ losses

Published in the Financial Times.

“Oklahoma bank failure reveals double standard” (November 23), Lex rightly says, but the US deposit insurance double standard is even more egregiously unfair than the article suggests. Many of the uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank were wealthy venture capital, private equity and cryptocurrency firms and barons, who would without doubt claim for themselves top financial expertise. They should have known the risks they were taking with their outsized, unsecured, uninsured deposits.

Moreover, these financial experts should have been on top of the mismanaged state of that bank in which they had so much at risk. Instead of having other people’s money taken to make them whole, they richly deserved the haircuts they would otherwise have had on the remarkably imprudent risk they voluntarily took.

I imagine these bailed-out Silicon Valley depositors deserved the losses they didn’t take far more than do the uninsured depositors in Lindsay, Oklahoma, (population 2,866) deserve the losses they are taking.

The Great Pretenders

It is 50 years ago Wednesday that economist Friedrich Hayek accepts his Nobel Prize with a warning about economists.

Published in The New York Sun.

It will be 50 years on Wednesday since economist Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” our Alex Pollock reminds us. That was the speech in which Hayek decried the “accelerating inflation” of the day — and the bitter irony that it had “been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue.” He concluded: “As a profession we have made a mess of things.”

It was of a piece with Hayek’s role as a contrarian in the economics profession that his “brilliant presentation,” Mr. Pollock notes, “explained the inherent limits of economics and the inevitable failure of trying to make it a predictive mathematical science.” Fifty years on, Hayek’s warning “applies particularly to central banks and their yearning to be economic philosopher-kings,” Mr. Pollock adds. Is this anniversary being marked by the pretenders at the Fed?

…

The refusal to consider gold as a factor in monetary deliberations reflects the failure to heed Hayek’s warning of 50 years ago. Mr. Pollock conveys a hope that institutions like the Fed “have taken to heart Hayek’s lesson that the ‘insuperable limits to knowledge’ ought to teach humility.” Central bankers, in Mr. Pollock’s telling, have reason to be “skeptical about their own forced guessing.” Yet if there is one thing that is in short supply at the Fed, it’s humility.

The Misesian: Printing Power: The Central Bank and the State

Published by the Mises Institute and in the Misesian.

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on October 12, 2024.

“Printing Power” in our title has a double meaning: It can mean “printing power”—the power to print money, which central banks have. But we will focus on “printing power”—the central bank’s money printing as an essential source of the power of the state, including of course the Federal Reserve’s printing to promote the power of the United States government. 

The Fed is good at literal printing, exercising its monopoly of currency issuance granted by the government. It has outstanding $2.3 trillion in pure paper money circulating around the world, of which perhaps 45 percent, or more than $1 trillion, is held abroad. All the currency represents zero-interest-rate financing of the Fed and the US government. With interest rates currently at 5 percent, this means a potential profit of $115 billion a year for them by the Fed’s having issued the currency. 

The Fed is also good at metaphorical printing, which is simply entering credits on the deposit accounts of banks in its own books. The Fed thereby creates money which it can use to buy the debt securities of the Treasury, or, in other words, to lend the printed money to the government. The Fed now has $4.1 trillion in deposits. 

All together then, as of October 2024, there is $6.4 trillion in currency and deposits used to finance the American state’s programs, payroll, interventions, subsidies, and wars. The Fed can and does use its buying power to keep the interest cost of the government’s debt lower than it would otherwise be. At peak Fed, in March 2022, the Fed owned $8.4 trillion in Treasury debt and government mortgage securities. 

Because the central bank prints power for the state, virtually all governments want and have one. 

The real first mandate of every central bank is to finance the government of which it is a part, thereby enhancing and promoting the state’s power. In addition to lending the government money, the central bank taxes the citizens on behalf of the government by creating inflation. Taxing by inflation transfers purchasing power from the people to the state without the bother of having to enact tax legislation. From the viewpoint of the government, the central bank provides a technique for more freely taxing the public. 

The ability to run budget deficits is key to the power of the state. It wants to keep paying soldiers, buying munitions, paying all the employees of the government bureaucracies, funding its projects, and sending money to political constituencies and friends at home and abroad, even if it is out of money. But it won’t run out of money if it has its central bank to print up what it needs. 

You will not find this real first mandate of central banks anywhere in the Federal Reserve’s copious public relations materials. You will find a lot of discussion about setting interest rates, the “dual mandate” of maximum employment and stable prices (now redefined by the Fed as perpetual inflation), fighting inflation, regulating banks, and promoting financial stability, but never a mention of the essence of central banking: financing the government. 

Our colleague Joe Salerno has discussed the evolution of economists from critics to friends of state power. I will add that running deficits and printing money also allow the government to hire and pay more economists. As is often noted, the Fed itself is the country’s largest employer of PhD economists.

The First Mandate in Central Bank History

The history of central banks clearly displays their link to government power as a constant theme. We will review a few examples. 

First, the model and most important central bank in the world, before it was displaced by the Fed, was the Bank of England. Why and how was the Bank of England created? As we read in Bernard Shull’s excellent book on the Fed, The Fourth Branch: “In 1694, the British Parliament desperately needed funds to finance . . . [its war] with Louis XIV of France. . . . It accepted a novel plan . . . to establish a bank that would raise capital and promptly lend it to the government at a bargain rate. . . . In return, [the plan’s proponents] would be granted a charter. . . . Thus the Bank of England came into existence as an instrument of war finance.” 

It worked. Historian William H. McNeill, in The Pursuit of Power, his study of state power from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, observes that the English invented “an efficient centralized credit mechanism for financing war by founding the Bank of England. . . . The result was to assure Great Britain of . . . naval superiority throughout the early eighteenth century. . . . Easy credit made it possible to expand the scale of British naval effort quite rapidly whenever a war emergency required such action.” 

In America, Alexander Hamilton, the father of the First Bank of the United States, the ultimate progenitor of the Fed, wrote in 1781: “Great Britain is indebted for the immense efforts she has been able to make in so many illustrious and successful wars essentially to that vast fabric of credit raised on the foundation [of the Bank of England].” 

Nor was the lesson lost on Napoleon, who created the Bank of France a century after his British antagonists founded the Bank of England. Organizing the bank in 1800, Napoleon rationally said he wanted a bank he could rely on to lend him money when he needed it. 

When the Federal Reserve was established another century later, the Federal Reserve Board met in the Treasury Building and was chaired by the secretary of the Treasury. It seemed less important then than now. Before a state dinner in its early days, the Federal Reserve Board complained that its members were too far back in the order of entry into the dinner, with insufficient prestige. They took this complaint to the Treasury secretary, who took it to the president, Woodrow Wilson. “They can come in after the fire department,” said Wilson. 

Today the Fed is the leading financial fire department in the world, although as James Grant wittily added in the new Mises documentary on the Fed, it is also the leading financial arsonist.

What really made the Fed’s reputation was its role in financing the American intervention in the First World War. Quoting Shull again: “When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the System turned its effort to supporting the Treasury’s deficit financing. . . . The Treasury’s plan was to sell securities at as low a cost as possible . . . and . . . by arrangements with the Federal Reserve, to provide for lowcost borrowing to purchase them. . . . [The Fed was] enlisted in the marketing and promotion of securities. . . . Banks were encouraged to borrow in order to purchase Treasury securities and to extend credit to customers to do so. . . . Preferential . . . rates were established for borrowing from the [Federal] Reserve Banks to purchase government securities. . . . The Federal Reserve Banks became great bond-distributing organizations.” 

The Fed had energetically carried out its real first mandate. Said the Treasury Department appreciatively in 1918: “Without [the Fed], it would be impossible to finance the tremendous credits required to assist the foreign governments making common cause with us against Germany, and to take care of the extraordinary expenditures entailed by our part in the war.” 

Or you might say the Fed was essential to financing America’s entanglement in the First World War, which led to immense growth in the size and reach of the Wilsonian US government. 

Said the Fed of itself: “From the outset, [the Federal Reserve] recognized its duty to cooperate unreservedly with the Government to provide funds needed for the war and to suspend the application of well-recognized principles of economics and finance. 

To repeat, ready and generous deficit financing is key to state power. This was most recently evident in the gigantic deficits of the covid financial and economic crisis and the vast subsidies of its aftermath, which led, as we have said, to peak Fed in March 2022.

“A Masterful Manipulation”

We will end with a vivid example of central bank printing power. 

At the beginning of the crisis of the First World War, in 1914, the Bank of England was the greatest central bank in the world. Yet the bank engaged in fraud to deceive the British public in order to finance the British war effort.

The first big government war bond issue of the war raised less than a third of its target sales to the public, but this real result was kept hidden. “The shortfall was secretly plugged by the Bank, with funds registered individually under the names of the Chief Cashier and his deputy to hide their true origin,” we learn from a Bank of England article published a century later. In other words, the Bank of England bought and monetized the new government debt and lied about it to the public to support the government’s war plans. 

The lie passed into the Financial Times under the headline “Over-subscribed War Loan”—an odd description, to say the least, of an issue with its allocation to the public in fact undersubscribed by two-thirds.

But the responsible officers of the Bank of England and the British government thought speaking the truth would endanger future government borrowing and be a propaganda victory for Germany. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a secret memorandum to His Majesty’s Treasury in which he described the Bank of England’s actions as “compelled by circumstances” and said that they had been “concealed from the public by a masterful manipulation.” 

“A masterful manipulation”! One very helpful to the British state, so it could get itself into the incredible disaster of the First World War. 

To sum up, central banks are a terrific means to enhance the power of the state by printing power. They cannot be properly understood without this insight.

13th Annual Housing Center Conference

Hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.

“…they should go back to the original Trump regulation which we helped the data together with our friend Alex Pollock…”

[at time stamp 1:56:50]

The Day Lyndon Johnson Pushed the Fed Chairman Around the Room While Shouting Curses at Him

Yet it turns out that the president still isn’t the boss of America’s central bank.

Published in The New York Sun.

Whether President Trump could fire Chairman Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve has become the subject of front-page stories and public speculation. It highlights the constitutional and legal question, “Who is the boss of the Fed Chairman?” It’s the Congress. The Fed, though, is always in a web of presidential politics. 

So recurring tension between presidents and Fed chairmen is to be expected. Presidents naturally would like to be able to create, as desired, all the money they want to spend and to keep down the interest cost of our Treasury’s debt. Presidents are boss of the Treasury Department, but not of the Fed. This has often led to frustration.

When the Fed had raised interest rates that President Lyndon Johnson opposed, LBJ angrily demanded: “How can I run the country and the government if… Bill Martin is going to run his own economy?” The Fed chairman at the time, William McChesney Martin, went to Johnson’s Texas ranch to discuss the issue. Johnson called Martin’s action “despicable,” and, it is said, physically pushed Martin around the room while shouting and swearing at him.

“He was very disagreeable,” said Martin later, though the higher interest rates stayed.

There is one case in history where a President actually forced out a Fed chairman, though unable to formally fire him. President Truman and Chairman Thomas McCabe had been disagreeing about whether the Fed should keep buying Treasury bonds at the pegged wartime rate of 2.5 percent, which Truman and his Treasury Secretary wanted. 

There was still a war on — the Korean. About the Fed’s allowing higher interest rates on Treasury bonds, Truman told McCabe, “That is exactly what Mr. Stalin wants.” Finally, Truman told McCabe, whom he had appointed as Fed chairman three years before, that “his services were no longer satisfactory.” McCabe bitterly resigned.

Truman then appointed Martin as Fed Chairman, thinking Martin would be loyal to the Treasury. Yet Martin did not wish to continue the peg, and Truman called Martin a “traitor” to his face. Then Martin stayed on as Fed Chairman for 19 years, overlapping with five presidents.

About Martin’s relationship to the executive branch, the Fed chairman said, “That is not to say that the Federal Reserve should operate in isolation from the Treasury. On the contrary, we enjoy cordial and close relations…and we are working together in harmony.” However, this was not always the case.

President Nixon seems to have had better luck with Chairman Arthur Burns. “Ample evidence…supports the claim that President Nixon,” with his eye on re-election, “urged Burns to follow a very expansive policy and that Burns agreed to do it,” wrote Allan Meltzer in his history of the Fed.

With wit and cynicism, Nixon said that he hoped the independent chairman would independently decide to agree with the President. The key principle in political philosophy behind the tension between presidents and Fed chairman was well stated in congressional testimony by Martin in 1964.

“The question is whether the principal officer in charge of paying the Government’s bills should be entrusted also with the power to create the money to pay them,” Martin said. We must agree with Martin that the answer to that question is no. That does not mean the Fed is accountable to no one.

The case for accountability was forcefully put by Congressman Wright Patman, chairman of the House Committee on Banking between 1963 and 1975: “I have long been concerned about the aloofness of the Federal Reserve from both the executive branch and the Congress,” Patman said. 

Congressman Wright Patman, right, speaks with monetary expert James H.R. Cromwell, left, and Speaker Bankhead at the Capitol in 1937. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

“Although the Federal Reserve is a creature of Congress, it is not subject to any of the usual Government budgetary, auditing, and appropriations procedures,” he added. “Also, the Federal Reserve is not required to obtain approval for its policies.” Today’s Fed thinks it can unilaterally commit the country to perpetual inflation at 2 percent a year without congressional approval.

Patman continued, “This sort of unbridled freedom… isn’t compatible with representative democratic government.”  I would say that he was right. It is compatible with a Platonic theory of rule by philosopher-kings, but not compatible with our constitutional republic.

The new president should work with the new Republican Congress, which has undoubted Constitutional authority over the Fed and over the nature of our money, to bring accountability to the Fed and move America in a direction of sound and stable money.

The Fed’s ‘temporary’ mortgage-backed security experiment will last decades

Published in The Hill with Paul Kupiec. Also published in RealClear Markets.

It has been nearly 14 years since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that the Fed’s emergency quantitative-easing policy, of which the most radical part was buying mortgage-backed securities, was “temporary” and would be “reversed.”  

The Fed made huge mortgage-backed securities purchases. The purchases pushed mortgage interest rates to artificially low levels, stoked the second great house price bubble of the 21st century and made houses unaffordable for many. 

In addition, these mortgage-backed securities investments unintentionally caused massive Fed losses. They are costing the Fed and taxpayers billions of dollars a month and will for years to come, as there is no practical way for the Fed to reverse its very large, deeply underwater mortgage-backed securities investment. 

The Fed created a giant, loss-making mortgage-backed securities portfolio. It currently owns $2.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities mostly bought at the top of the market when mortgage yields were artificially low. 

Today, these mortgage-backed securities are worth far less than the Fed paid for them. The June 30 Fed financial statement shows an unrealized market value loss of $423 billion on the Fed’s mortgage-backed securities investments. This loss is nearly 10 times the Fed’s financial statement reported capital of $43 billion. 

We say “reported capital” because the Fed has suffered $207 billion in realized cash operating losses that it has amazingly not deducted from its reported capital. Using standard accounting rules, per our estimate, the Fed’s actual capital as of Oct. 30, is $43 billion minus its accumulated cash operating loss of $207 billion; or negative $164 billion.  

In addition, the Fed has $423 billion in unrealized mortgage-backed securities market value losses because interest rates today are much higher than the rates the Fed earns on its mortgage-backed securities. 

The Fed invested in 30-year fixed-rate mortgage-backed securities, almost all of which have remaining maturities of more than 10 years. It earns about 2.2 percent interest on its mortgage-backed securities but pays a 4.9 percent interest rate to fund them. 

The Fed has a negative 2.7 percent spread on these mortgage-backed securities meaning that it costs the Fed an annualized $62 billion to own these securities. Remarkable asset-liability management!  

The Fed’s cash losses are also losses to the U.S. Treasury. So without any congressional approval, the Fed’s very large, very underwater mortgage-backed securities investment is imposing tens of billions of dollars of costs annually on taxpayers.   

According to a congressional testimony about the Fed’s emergency investments by Chairman Bernanke on June 12, 2014: 

“What we are doing here is a temporary measure which will be reversed so that at the end of the process, the money supply will be normalized, the Fed’s balance sheet will be normalized, and there will be no permanent increase … in the Fed’s balance sheet.”

It is now 2024. How long is “temporary”? Why doesn’t the Fed just sell its mortgage-backed securities and put the problem behind it?   

It is not practical for the Fed to sell all its mortgage-backed securities. If it sold them, the Fed would, under the unrealistic assumption that it could sell its mortgage-backed securities at their current estimated market value, realize $423 billion in new cash losses. We estimate that would make the Fed’s capital, measured using standard accounting rules, negative $587 billion. 

While the Fed would, we expect, continue to claim that it had $43 billion in capital, the $423 billion in market value losses would become actual cash losses and have to be reported in the Fed’s profit and loss statement. Reporting such a huge cash loss would not only be an embarrassment but could trigger congressional investigations and unwanted oversight. 

More realistically, the Fed would simply not be able to sell its mortgage-backed securities for its current fair value estimate. The Fed’s $2.3 trillion investment is a massive position. It is so big that in reality it can’t be sold. There are about $9.4 trillion in total mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae of which, the Fed owns almost 25 percent. 

If the Fed tried to quickly sell its portfolio, the sale would crash the mortgage-backed securities market and result in a cash loss much larger than $423 billion. It could reduce the inevitable negative market price impact by liquidating its mortgage-backed securities gradually over time, but the mere announcement that the Fed planned to sell would lower prices in the mortgage-backed securities market. 

Moreover, either approach would push up mortgage interest rates — hardly a welcome political outcome. 

It seems likely the mortgage-backed securities will be on the Fed’s balance sheet until they finally mature. In the meantime, they will continue racking up billions of dollars in cash losses each month. 

It looks like the Fed is stuck with very large, losing “temporary” mortgage-backed securities investments for a long time to come. 

Alex J. Pollock is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Paul H. Kupiec is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Revolt at the Fed

Editorial published in The New York Sun:

Congressman Wright Patman was trying to get the Fed audited like any other federal agency. The bank demurred. The late Patman is lucky he’s not alive today, when, as our Alex Pollock has been warning, the Federal Reserve’s real capital is now negative $158 billion. That puts its own light on Martin’s contention that the bank is not part of the government’s three branches. Who’s on the hook for that negative capital?

Should the Fed Be Independent or Accountable?

The central bank has lost all its capital more than four times over, and its real capital today is negative $158 billion.

Published in The New York Sun.

As October 2024 begins, the Federal Reserve’s accumulated operating losses have passed the astonishing amount of $200 billion — to be specific, its losses reached $201.2 billion as of October 2. * Besides far exceeding the Fed’s capital, these losses are also a $201 billion and growing hit to taxpayers.  This alone must call into question the Fed’s claim that it should be “independent.”

Even without the losses, the Fed’s refrain that it both is and should be independent contradicts the fundamental American Constitutional principle that all parts of the government must be subject to checks and balances from others.  The Fed, like all government bureaucracies, yearns to be free from the mere elected representatives of the People. 

Because it is such an immensely powerful part of the government, the Fed especially needs to have the fundamental checks and balances principle firmly applied to it. Nevertheless, the Fed’s independence claim is supported by many commentators, particularly economists and journalists. This seems to reflect the Fed’s formidable public relations skills and the human longing to believe that the inherently uncertain economic world can be taken care of by some benevolent philosopher-kings in the Fed.

Consider that the Fed is in essence an attempt at central planning and price fixing. In this attempt, it uses changing and debatable theories and data reflecting the past.  There is no data on the future. Neither the Fed nor anybody else has the knowledge of the future which would be required to “manage the economy.”  

So the Fed could not, say, know what the results would be of its unprecedented monetizing of $8 trillion in long-term Treasury debt and mortgages, or that one result would be its massive losses. This bloating of its balance sheet by “quantitative easing” was accurately described by the former Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, as “a gamble.”

The Fed’s efforts share the impossibility of the requisite knowledge with all tries at government central planning, as demonstrated by Ludwig von Mises and Friederich Hayek.  Neither the Fed nor anybody else can know, but only guess about, to take another example, what the celebrated “neutral rate of interest” is or was or will be. 

That this theoretical neutral rate is called “r-star” gave rise to the brilliant and honest aphorism of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell: “We are navigating by the stars under cloudy skies.” While flying by the seat of its pants, gambling with trillions of dollars of other people’s money, and navigating by the stars under cloudy skies, how independent should it be?

In 1964, the Domestic Finance Subcommittee of the House Committee on Currency and Banking held hearings on “The Federal Reserve After Fifty Years.”  The Chairman of the Banking Committee was then the Democrat from Texas Wright Patman.  Among the conclusions were: “An independent central bank is essentially undemocratic”; and “Americans have been against ideas and institutions which smack of government by philosopher-kings.”

These propositions in American political philosophy are still correct. The Fed should not be a philosopher-king. It should be accountable.  My conclusion is that the Fed should be independent from the President and the Treasury Department, but accountable to the Congress. The Congress possesses the Constitutional Money and Taxing Powers which the Fed serves.

We must include taxation because the inflation the Fed creates is a tax, which takes the People’s purchasing power and transfers it to the government. If Congress exercises its authority, it can rewrite the Federal Reserve Act and instruct, redirect, restructure,or even abolish the Fed. It, after all, created the Fed in the first place.

It can review anything about the Fed it wants to.  The definition of the kind of money America will have, whether the nation will have stable prices or perpetual inflation, and if inflation, at what rate, are all essential Congressional responsibilities, not prerogatives of the Federal Reserve.  So are the powers and the organization of the Fed. 

That underscores the need for Congress to review whether it wants a national goal of 2 percent inflation forever with perpetual depreciation of the currency — meaning a policy that the money the government issues should become less valuable.

The financial statements of the Fed also warrant scrutiny by Congress.  Losses of $201 billion compared to the Fed’s total capital of $43 billion means the Fed’s real capital is negative $158 billion.  It has lost all its capital more than four times over.  If the Congress is not happy with a technically insolvent central bank, it could recapitalize it, as part of establishing the Fed’s Constitutional accountability.

___________

* Federal Reserve H.4.1 Release, October 3, 2024, Section 6.

Printing Power: The Central Bank and the State

Based on a speech at the Mises Institute Summit, Hilton Head, South Carolina, October 12, 2024.

“Printing Power” in our title has a double meaning:  it can mean “printing power”—the power to print money which central banks have.  But we will focus on “printing power”—the central bank’s money printing as an essential source of the power of the State, including of course the Federal Reserve’s printing to promote the power of the United States government.

The Fed is good at literal printing, exercising its monopoly of currency issuance granted by the government.  It has outstanding $2.3 trillion in pure paper money circulating around the world, of which perhaps 45% or more than $1 trillion is held abroad.  All the currency represents zero-interest rate financing of the Fed and the U.S. government.  With interest rates at 5%, this means a potential profit of $115 billion a year for them by the Fed’s having issued the currency.

The Fed is also good at metaphorical “printing,” which is simply entering credits on its own books to the deposit accounts of banks.  The Fed thereby creates money which it can use to buy the debt securities of the Treasury—in other words, to lend the printed money to the government.  The Fed now has $4.1 trillion in deposits.

Together then, as of October 2024, there is $6.4 trillion of currency and deposits used to finance the American State’s programs, payroll, interventions, subsidies, and wars.  The Fed can and does use its buying power to keep the interest cost of the government’s debt lower than it would otherwise be.  At peak Fed in March 2022, the Fed owned $8.4 trillion in Treasury debt and government mortgage securities.

Because the central bank prints power for the State, virtually all governments want and have one. 

The real first mandate of every central bank is to finance the government of which it is a part, thereby enhancing and promoting the State’s power.  In addition to lending the government money, the central bank taxes the citizens on behalf of the government by creating inflation.  Taxing by inflation transfers purchasing power from the People to the State without the bother of having to enact tax legislation.  From the viewpoint of the government, the central bank provides a free taxing technique.

The ability to run budget deficits is key to the power of the State.  It wants to keep paying soldiers, buying munitions, paying all the employees of the government bureaucracies, funding its projects, sending money to political constituencies and friends at home and abroad, even if it is out of money.  But it won’t run out of money if it has its central bank to print up what it needs.

You will not find this real first mandate of central banks anywhere in the Federal Reserve’s copious public relations materials.  You will find a lot of discussion about setting interest rates, the “dual mandate” of maximum employment and stable prices (now redefined by the Fed as perpetual inflation), fighting inflation, regulating banks, and promoting financial stability, but never a mention of the essence of central banking: financing the government.

Our colleague Joe Salerno has discussed the evolution of economists from critics to friends of state power.  I will add that running deficits and printing money also allow the government to hire and pay more economists.  As is often noted, the Fed itself is the country’s largest employer of Ph.D. economists.

The First Mandate in Central Bank History

The history of central banks clearly displays their link to government power as a constant theme.  We will review a few examples.

First, the model and most important central bank in the world before it was displaced by the Fed was the Bank of England.  Why and how was the Bank of England created?  As we read in Bernard Shull’s excellent book on the Fed, The Fourth Branch[1]:

          “In 1694, the British Parliament desperately needed funds to finance its [war] with Louis XIV of France.  It accepted a novel plan to establish a bank that would raise capital and promptly lend it to the government at [a] bargain rate.  In return [it] would be granted a charter.  Thus the Bank of England came into existence as an instrument of war finance.”

It worked.  As historian William H. McNeill, in The Pursuit of Power, his study of state power from the 11th to the 20th centuries, observes:

          “The English invent[ed] an efficient centralized credit mechanism for financing war by founding the Bank of England.  The result was to assure Great Britain of naval superiority throughout the early eighteenth century.  Easy credit made it possible to expand the scale of British naval effort quite rapidly whenever a war emergency required.”

In America, Alexander Hamilton, the father of the First Bank of the United States, the ultimate progenitor of the Fed, wrote in 1781:

          “Great Britain is indebted for the immense efforts she has been able to make in so many illustrious and successful wars essentially to that vast fabric of credit raised on the foundation [of the Bank of England].”

Nor was the lesson lost on Napoleon, who created the Bank of France a century behind his British antagonists.  Organizing the bank in 1800, Napoleon rationally said he wanted a bank he could rely on to lend him money when he needed it.

When the Federal Reserve was established another century later, the Federal Reserve Board met in the Treasury Building and was chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury.  It seemed less important then than now.  For a state dinner in its early days, the Federal Reserve Board complained that its members were too far back in the order of entry with insufficient prestige.  They took this complaint to the Treasury Secretary, who took it to the President, Woodrow Wilson.  “They can come in after the fire department,” said Wilson.

Today the Fed is the leading financial fire department in the world, although as James Grant wittily added in the new Mises movie on the Fed, they are also the leading financial arsonist.

What really made the Fed’s reputation was its role in financing the American intervention in the First World War.  Quoting Shull again:

          “When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the System turned its effort to supporting the Treasury’s deficit financing. The Treasury’s plan was to sell securities at as low a cost as possible by arrangements with the Fed to provide for low-cost borrowing to purchase them.  [The Fed] was enlisted in the marketing and promotion of securities.  Banks were encouraged to borrow in order to purchase Treasury securities and to extend credit to their customers to do so.   Preferential rates were established for borrowing from the Federal Reserve Banks to purchase government securities.  The Federal Reserve Banks became great bond-distributing organizations.”

The Fed had energetically carried out its real first mandate.  Said the Treasury Department appreciatively in 1918:

          “Without [the Fed], it would be impossible to finance the tremendous credits required to assist the foreign governments making common cause with us against Germany, and to take care of the extraordinary expenditures entailed by our part in the war.”

Or you might say, the Fed was essential to financing America’s entanglement in the First World War, which led to immense growth in the size and reach of the Wilsonian U.S. government.

Said the Fed of itself:

          “From the outset, [the Federal Reserve] recognized its duty to cooperate unreservedly with the Government to provide funds needed for the war and to suspend the application of well-recognized principles of economics and finance.”

To repeat, a key need of State power is ready and generous deficit financing.  Most recently, this was evident in the gigantic deficits of the Covid financial and economic crisis and the vast subsidies of its aftermath, leading as we have said, to peak Fed in March 2022.

A “Masterful Manipulation”

We will end with a vivid example of the central bank printing power.

At the beginning of the crisis of the First World War in 1914, the Bank of England was the greatest central bank in the world.  Yet the Bank engaged in fraud to deceive the British public in order to finance the British war effort. 

The first big government war bond issue of the war raised less than a third of its target sales to the public, but this real result was kept hidden.  “The shortfall was secretly plugged by the Bank, with funds registered individually under the names of the Chief Cashier and his deputy to hide their true origin,” we learn from a Bank of England article published a century later.  In other words, the Bank of England bought and monetized the new government debt and lied about it to the public to support the government’s war plans.

The lie passed into the Financial Times under the headline, “OVER-SUBSCRIBED WAR LOAN”—an odd description, to say the least, of an issue with its allocation to the public in fact undersubscribed by two-thirds.

But responsible officers of the Bank of England and the British government thought speaking the truth would endanger future government borrowing and be a propaganda victory for Germany.  The famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a secret memorandum to His Majesty’s Treasury, in which he described the Bank of England’s actions as “compelled by circumstances” and that they had been “concealed from the public by a masterful manipulation.”

A “masterful manipulation”!  One very helpful to the British State, so it could get itself into the incredible disaster of the First World War.

To sum up:

Central banks are a terrific means to enhance the power of the State by printing power.  They cannot be properly understood without this insight.

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[1] The quotations I use are excerpts, with ellipses deleted.

The Fed’s Remarkable ‘Independence’ Claim

Published in AIER’s The Daily Economy.

In the course of human events, the Federal Reserve is constantly declaring itself independent — that it both is and should be independent. The specific issue of whether this unelected body should be independent of the elected President has again been raised in the 2024 presidential campaign. The general issue of whether a central bank as part of the government can or should be independent is classic. 

Given the foundations of American political philosophy, to say that the Federal Reserve should be independent is a remarkable claim. The Constitutional bedrock of the American government is that all its parts be subject to checks and balances from others. Should one immensely powerful part of the government, the Fed, be exempt from checks and balances? It seems to me that the answer is obvious: of course not. 

Yet many people, especially economists and journalists, believe the Fed should somehow be independent. How can this be? That the Fed itself should unendingly promote this idea, and therefore its own power, is not a surprise. Every government bureaucracy yearns to be free of any meaningful oversight and discipline by the mere elected representatives of the People. But by what feat of public relations brilliance did the Fed manage to convince so many others of this hardly self-evident proposition? 

The Fed’s Knowledge Problem 

Put simply, the Fed is an ongoing attempt at central planning and price fixing. It is an unelected committee whose actions are based on debatable and changing theories applied to data which is already from the past by definition. The Fed fixes the price of money, performs various bailouts and lends to the government. (For all this, its preferred, more dignified name is “monetary policy.”)  

The promoters of Fed independence share an unspoken and mistaken assumption: that the Fed is competent to have unchecked power of price fixing and manipulating money and credit–or in a more grandiose vision, of “managing the economy.” Although in fact neither the Fed nor anybody else can have the knowledge required to do this, it is assumed that the Fed knows what the results will be of, for example, monetizing $8 trillion of long-term bonds and mortgages. These unprecedented “quantitative easing” investments were accurately described by former-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as “a gamble.” The Fed cannot know what the results of its own actions will be — rather, it is flying by the seat of its pants.  

An insightful old story compares the Fed’s monetary task to trying to land a 747 aircraft with the windshield painted over, and with instruments which tell it only approximately where the aircraft was and approximately how fast it was flying 15 minutes ago. The Fed’s problem is even harder than this, since financial actors are always anticipating what it may do, and therefore the airport it is trying to reach is in effect moving around. Moreover, the Fed has to be constantly busy trying to promote the crew’s credibility and assure the passengers on this 747 that there is nothing to worry about because it is in control. 

Like all attempts at central planning, the Fed’s efforts are faced with recursive complexity and inescapable uncertainty. Although it will have some successes, it is also doomed to recurring failures. It cannot escape the problems of an unknowable economic and financial future and an insufficiently understood present. Even how to interpret the economic past always remains debatable. In short, the Fed inevitably suffers from the knowledge problem of all central planners demonstrated by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  

Neither the Fed nor anybody else can know, but only guess about, for example, what the celebrated “neutral rate of interest” is or was or will be. That this theoretical neutral rate is called “r-star” gave rise to the brilliant and honest aphorism of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell: “We are navigating by the stars under cloudy skies.” 

How Should the Fed Fit into the Constitutional System of Checks and Balances? 

While flying by the seat of your pants, gambling with many trillions of dollars, and navigating by the stars under cloudy skies, how independent should you be? 

The Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1964 was Wright Patman, a populist Democrat from Texas and sharp critic of the Fed. He conducted hearings that year in which the Committee’s Domestic Finance Subcommittee reviewed in detail “The Federal Reserve After Fifty Years.” Here are some of their conclusions: 

“An independent central bank is essentially undemocratic.” 
“Americans have been against ideas and institutions which smack of government by philosopher kings.” 
“Our democratic tradition alone will be enough to make many thoughtful people demand a politically accountable central bank.” 
“To the extent that the [Federal Reserve] Board operates autonomously, it would seem to run contrary to another principle of our constitutional order — that of the accountability of power. 

It seems to me that these conclusions of 60 years ago are all exactly correct (although I do not agree with other conclusions of the report). 

If one agrees with Wright Patman that government by philosopher kings is contrary to American principles, that the Fed should not try to be a philosopher-king and should therefore be accountable and not independent, the question remains: to whom should the Fed be accountable and from whom independent?  

My conclusion is that the Fed should be independent of the President and the Treasury, but it should be accountable to, not independent of, the Congress. The Congress is the possessor of the Constitutional Money Power (“To coin money [and] regulate the value thereof”) and the Taxing Power (“To lay and collect Taxes”). The Fed serves as a critical part of both. We must include taxation because the inflation the Fed creates is in fact a tax, which takes the People’s purchasing power and transfers it to the government. 

The President and the Treasury 

It is natural that the President and his Treasury Department should want to control the Fed, since this gives them the power to keep spending money when they are in deficit, by having the Fed print it up. Presidents of both parties have often wanted lower, or at least not higher, interest rates for political purposes and used their influence with the Fed accordingly.  

The Treasury Department of course likes lower interest rates which reduce the cost of the debt it issues, and reduce the amount of new debt needed to pay the interest on the old debt. This natural connection was displayed in the original version of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, which made the Secretary of the Treasury automatically the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (this provision was in force until 1935). 

For extended times in Federal Reserve history, especially during major wars and emergencies — beginning with the American entry into World War I in 1917 when it was three years old — the Fed has been subservient to the Treasury Department. In these times, the Fed devoted itself to loyally financing the government’s deficit as needed. It did so again during the Covid financial and economic crisis and aftermath in 2020-21. Will the Fed repeat this performance in the future? Given a war or other emergency big enough, it will. 

Historically, under the master politician Franklin Roosevelt, “the Treasury controlled most decisions” and “the Federal Reserve had a subsidiary role,” according to Allan Meltzer’s magisterial A History of the Federal Reserve. Also during this period, the Treasury took every ounce of the Federal Reserve’s gold. Meltzer summarizes this period as the Fed “in the backseat.” 

The intense dispute between President Truman and his Treasury Department, on one side, and the Fed, on the other, in 1951 is notable in Fed history. Truman was in the middle of the Korean War, the American Army had retreated down the Korean peninsula under the Chinese onslaught, and the Treasury had to finance the war. They wanted the Fed to keep buying Treasury bonds at the rate pegged since World War II at 2.5 percent. But in this instance, the Fed thought interest rates should rise a little. Truman told the Fed Chairman, Thomas McCabe, “That is exactly what Mr. Stalin wants. He then in effect forced out McCabe and put in a new Chairman who he thought was his own man, William McChesney Martin of the Treasury Department. Martin, however, favored somewhat higher rates to control inflation and a Fed “independent within the government.” Truman called Martin to his face a “traitor.” 

President Lyndon Johnson had a memorable dispute with the Fed, when the Fed raised interest rates to confront the rising inflation from Johnson’s Vietnam War and welfare expansion deficits. “How can I run the country and the government if… Bill Martin is going to run his own economy?” the furious President reportedly demanded. Martin (who as Fed Chairman was on his fourth President) traveled to Johnson’s Texas ranch to discuss the issue. Johnson called Martin’s action “despicable” and according to one report, physically pushed the proper Martin around the living room of the ranch, shouting at him. Quite a scene to picture. 

We come to the interesting relationship between President Nixon and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns. Meltzer writes, “Ample evidence…supports the claim that President Nixon urged Burns to follow a very expansive policy and that Burns agreed to do it.” In Burns’ defense, Meltzer adds that at that time “many economists and politicians…wanted to reduce unemployment using highly expansive policies.” Wittily and cynically, Nixon said he hoped the independent Fed Chairman would independently decide to agree with the President. 

Burns is said to have remarked with fine irony, “We dare not exercise our independence for fear of losing it.” 

The Fed is always in a web of presidential and financial politics. President Trump’s pressure on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, while delivered in some characteristic language, repeated the historical precedents. 

We can safely predict that this natural tension between the President, the Treasury and the Fed will continue into the future as far as we can imagine. Nonetheless, the Fed should be Constitutionally accountable to the Congress, not to the President and the Treasury.  

The Congress 

At all times, the Fed remains a creature of Congress, if the Congress exerts its authority. If Congress has the will and the political forces align, it can rewrite the Federal Reserve Act and in so doing, redirect, instruct, restructure, or even abolish the Fed. In addition, as the then-President of the New York Fed testified during the 1964 hearings, “Obviously, the Congress which set us up has the authority and should review our actions at any time they want to, and in any way they want to.” Should Congress audit the Fed? Of course, any time it wants to. 

The definition of the kind of money the nation will have is an essential Congressional responsibility, not a prerogative of the Federal Reserve. Another Congressional responsibility is definition of the powers and organization of the Fed. The Congress in the past has often legislated on these central public questions, including: 

•   The Gold Standard Act of 1900 — defining money. 

•  The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 — creating the Fed. 

•  The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 — taking away the Fed’s gold and taking the country off the gold standard into a fiat paper money standard. 

•  The Banking Act of 1935 — reorganizing and centralizing the Fed. 

• The Bretton-Woods Agreement Act of 1945 — taking the United States into a new international monetary system. Central to it was the commitment to foreign governments that the US would redeem dollars for gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce (The dollar has since depreciated against gold by more than 98 percent). In 1971, under President Nixon, the US reneged on the Bretton-Woods Agreement, putting the world on a pure fiat money regime and enabling the Great Inflation of the 1970s. 

•  The Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977 — trying to make the Fed more accountable to Congress and assigning the Fed its so-called “dual mandate” of maximum employment and stable prices. 

•  The Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978 — suggesting a long-term inflation goal of zero if consistent with the dual mandate. 

Regarding the essential political goal of stable prices, in 2012 the Fed on its own authority, without the approval of Congress, redefined “stable prices” to mean perpetual inflation. It unilaterally proclaimed that the United States should have 2 percent inflation forever. At that rate, in a single lifetime of 80 years, average consumer prices will quintuple. Whether America wants that kind of constantly depreciating currency is a fundamental political question for the Congress. 

How in the world did the Fed imagine that it had the authority all on its own to commit the nation to perpetual inflation and perpetual depreciation of the currency at some rate of its own choosing? It suggests a certain arrogance — something a philosopher-king could do, but not a government body subject to Constitutional checks and balances. The idea should have been submitted to the Congress for approval. It wasn’t. 

Therefore I propose a Federal Reserve Reform Act of 2025, numbering among its provisions these: 

• Congress should cancel the 2 percent inflation target set unilaterally by the Fed until Congress has approved that or some other guidance. For better guidance, I suggest price stability. This would mean a long-run average inflation rate of approximately zero — or perhaps for political agreement, between zero and one percent. The Fed should be a key participant in this discussion, but not the decision-maker. 

• Congress should make it clear that the Fed in general does not have unilateral authority to decide on the nature of US money, which is an essential public question, and that any such decision requires review and approval by Congress. 
  

• Congress should seriously review the financial statements of the Fed. Since the Fed has now lost $200 billion over the last two years, it has burned through all its retained earnings and all its paid-in capital more than four times over. This massive loss means that the Fed’s real capital is now negative $156 billion. Any organization that claims independence, even if it doesn’t really have it, ought at least to be solvent. Congress should recapitalize the Fed. 

Such reforms would constrain the Federal Reserve’s declarations of independence with Constitutional accountability. 

Event video: AEI: Is the Federal Reserve Behind the Curve?

Watch the video here.

Event Summary

On October 8, AEI’s Desmond Lachman hosted Donald Kohn of the Brookings Institution, Nathan Sheets of Citigroup, William White of the C. D. Howe Institute, and Alex J. Pollock of the Mises Institute to discuss whether the Federal Reserve was behind the curve in cutting interest rates to support the economy.

The panelists generally agreed that while the Fed has had considerable success in regaining inflation control without inducing a recession, the Fed should be more forward-looking in making its policy decisions. They agreed that the Fed’s task is complicated by a high degree of uncertainty as to future shocks. These included the risk that the Middle Eastern conflict could cause a spike in oil prices and that the commercial real estate sector’s slump could adversely affect regional banks, as well as an unsustainable public debt situation, an increasing tide of protectionism, and the collapse of China’s real-estate market.

Each panelist commented on whether the Federal Reserve’s recent decision to cut interest rates was consistent with meeting its 2 percent inflation target and avoiding an economic recession. They agreed that while signs were encouraging, it was too early make a final judgment. The event concluded with an audience Q&A.

—Jack Rowing

Event Description

Following years of ultra-easy monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has over the past two years pursued a tight monetary policy to regain control over inflation. As inflation shows signs of easing, the debate about the pace of lowering interest rates has intensified.

This event will discuss whether the Fed has successfully achieved a soft economic landing and how Fed policy has affected financial stability.

Submit questions to Jack.Rowing@aei.org or on Twitter with #AskAEIEcon.

Event Materials

Event Transcript

Agenda

2:00 p.m.
Opening Remarks:
Desmond Lachman, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

2:05 p.m.
Panel Discussion

Panelists:
Donald Kohn, Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics, Brookings Institution
Desmond Lachman, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Nathan Sheets, Global Chief Economist, Citigroup
William White, Senior Fellow, C. D. Howe Institute

Moderator:
Alex J. Pollock, Senior Fellow, Mises Institute

3:30 p.m.
Q&A

4:00 p.m.
Adjournment

A European Fannie/Freddie?

A bad idea

Published in Housing Finance International Journal.

The U.S. national housing finance market is uniquely dominated by two government mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They do exactly the same thing, creating mortgage-backed securities that are de facto government-guaranteed. They are both completely dependent on the credit support of the U.S. Treasury, and thus dependent on American taxpayers. Both went broke in 2008, and both were bailed out by the Treasury, which still owns $193 billion of their senior preferred stock, sixteen years later. Both are in an unending conservatorship of a very political government bureaucracy, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. They are in effect a single huge market intervention and subsidy.

Fannie/Freddie are truly massive, with combined assets of US$ 7.6 trillion.1 They create a systemically risky concentration of national mortgage credit exposure in Washington DC. They are and always have been politicized. They are popular with many politicians because they can be used to create subsidies to favored political constituencies without Congress having to appropriate funds. They are highly popular with Wall Street firms because they create securities easy to sell to domestic and global investors by using the credit of the U.S. Treasury.

Fannie/Freddie were central to causing the U.S. housing bubble of 1999-2006 and its subsequent collapse,2 and supported the explosive house price inflation of 2019-2022, which has made U.S. house prices widely unaffordable.

Should the European Union import this dubious American idea? A distinguished committee chaired by the former Governor of the Bank of France, Christian Noyer, thinks so. Its April 2024 white paper, “Developing European Capital Markets to Finance the Future,” proposes a “European securitization platform,” which would “target a massive asset class,” and “target a homogeneous and low-risk asset class, such as residential loans.”

The paper maintains that “a European platform for securitization could be a powerful tool for deepening capital markets.” So it might, but an essential requirement of the proposal is to move credit risk to the government at a combined European level, analogously to what Fannie/Freddie do. “To achieve the objectives the platform must grant a European guarantee of last resort for securitization of mortgage or SME loans.”3 By providing the guarantee, “a common platform would create a new common safe asset.” The safety for the investors comes from the guarantee: “Any residual heterogeneity would be eliminated, from the investor’s point of view, by a broad government guarantee.” In other words, remove the credit risk from the investors by moving it to the government and the taxpayers.

The U.S. model is clearly in mind: “Platforms for issuing and guaranteeing mortgagebacked securities are long-established in the US,” the proposal observes, and “Guaranteed securitized assets broadly work as safe assets, especially agency MBS,4 which are used as collateral in almost one-third of repo transactions in the United States and trade at close to sovereign rates.”

In short, what is being proposed is a European Fannie/Freddie.

Well aware of the housing finance bailouts previously provided by U.S. taxpayers, the white paper sets an “objective of zero cost for public finances” for a European securitization platform. The zero public cost objective is a nice idea, but the American experience warns of many government guarantee schemes which were similarly supposed to be selffinancing, but failed instead. The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, the Farm Credit System, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, the federal Student Loan program, and of course Fannie/Freddie, all became insolvent and costly to the public finances. Confronted by the combination of political pressures to subsidize current borrowers and the uncertainty of future credit crises, it is very difficult for government guarantee programs to achieve their zero public cost aspirations.

The white paper introduces a further difficulty. The platform is to operate with a European-level guarantee, and “supervision at EU-level should be mandatory.” Nonetheless, “The guarantee provided by the platform should be structured to exclude any transfers between Member States.” This is certainly different from the American model with respect to U.S. states. It is impossible to imagine how Fannie/Freddie could operate without pooling income and losses among states, and it is likewise hard to imagine how European-wide guarantees could involve no transfers among Member States. How this is proposed to work is not clear.

The white paper displays a particular danger of all government guarantee schemes. It develops a securitization proposal obviously designed for mortgage loans, based on the need for “low risk” and “homogeneous” loans with a “standardization objective.” Then it slips in, doubtless as a political thought, that maybe the platform could also be used for commercial loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”). Such loans are of an entirely different kind, with fundamentally different risk characteristics. This is a good example of how a government guarantee is always subject to political pressure to move to riskier loans, just as Fannie/Freddie were pressured into buying low quality, nonprime mortgages, helping inflate the housing bubble.

The European Fannie/Freddie proposal has been accurately criticized by Mark Weinrich, Secretary General of the International Union for Housing Finance.5 I will stress four of Mark’s arguments, then state them less diplomatically. His arguments and my changes follow:

Weinrich: “Government backing of mortgage-backed securities can encourage risky lending practices, as lenders may believe that losses will ultimately be absorbed by the government.”

Pollock: “…as lenders will believe that losses will ultimately be absorbed by the government.”

Weinrich: “Government intervention in the mortgage market can distort pricing and allocation of credit.”

Pollock: “Government intervention…will distort pricing and allocation of credit.”

Weinrich: “A centralized entity would concentrate mortgage risk with a single institution, potentially creating a single point of failure.”

Pollock: “…thereby creating a single point of failure.”

Weinrich: “Creating a centralized European securitization platform could increase systemic risk.”

Pollock: “…will increase systemic risk.”

All of these problems have already characterized Fannie/Freddie in the American experience. Creating a massive government guarantee while claiming that it will be selffinancing tempts people to believe it will be free. It won’t be.

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[1] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 10-Q filings, June 30, 2024.

[2] See Peter J. Wallison, Hidden in Plain Sight, 2015; and Alex J. Pollock, Boom and Bust, Chapter 7, “A $5 Trillion Government Failure,” 2011.

[3] We address the troublesome addition of “or SME loans” below.

[4] “Agency” MBS are Fannie/Freddie MBS plus those of Ginnie Mae, which has a separate government guarantee.

Can the Federal Reserve Buy Gold? Should It?

Published in Law & Liberty with Paul H. Kupiec.

Since the sixth century BC reign of Croesus of Lydia, refined gold has served as a monetary store of value. Today, many central banks, including the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank, the German Bundesbank, the Bank of France, the Bank of Italy, the Dutch National Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Reserve Bank of India, the People’s Bank of China, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore among others, hold gold as an investment and reserve against their monetary liabilities. It may surprise some that, in contrast, the Federal Reserve owns no gold at all.

The original 1913 Federal Reserve Act required the Fed to hold substantial amounts of gold to back its outstanding Federal Reserve Notes and member bank deposits. In 1934, the Roosevelt administration pushed for, and Congress passed, legislation that made it illegal for US persons, including the Federal Reserve, to hold gold for monetary purposes. Fed resistance notwithstanding, it was required by law to hand over all its gold to the US Treasury. The last link between gold and the US dollar was severed in the early 1970s and all legal prohibitions against US persons buying, selling, and holding gold were repealed shortly thereafter. Fifty years later many US citizens and financial organizations hold gold investments, but the Federal Reserve has not owned any gold since 1934.

This raises two interesting questions: Can the Fed today legally buy, sell, and hold gold? And if it can, should it?

The History of Gold and the US Dollar

From 1900 until 1933, a US dollar was legally redeemable for “25.8 grains of gold nine-tenths fine” or $20.67 per fine troy ounce of gold. On April 5, 1933, one month after taking office, as part of his emergency actions in the financial and economic crisis, following the temporary closing of all banks, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order prohibiting American individuals, partnerships, associations, or corporations from owning (so-called “hoarding”) gold. The order required all Americans to turn in their gold to a Federal Reserve Bank, with criminal penalties for violations, receiving in exchange paper dollars at the official price of $20.67 per troy ounce. This radical executive action was subsequently endorsed in a joint Congressional resolution and later in statute.

That year Congress also passed the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act of 1933. Part 8 of this law empowered the President:

By proclamation to fix the weight of the gold dollar in grains of nine tenths fine and also to fix the weight of the silver dollar in grains nine tenths fine at a fixed ratio in relation to the gold dollar as in such amounts as he finds necessary … but in no event shall the weight of the gold dollar be fixed so as to reduce its present weight by more than 50 per centum.

President Roosevelt soon exercised this power.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 required Federal Reserve Banks to send all of their gold to the Treasury in exchange for “gold certificates” with a fixed dollar-denominated value of $20.67 per fine troy ounce of gold transferred to the Treasury. These certificates, still on the balance sheet of the Fed today, cannot be redeemed for gold. The 1934 Act reaffirmed the legal prohibition against Americans owning gold for monetary or investment purposes and further required that circulating gold coins be withdrawn and melted into gold bars, ended gold coinage, and suspended the domestic redemption of US currency in gold.

The day after the passage of the Gold Reserve Act in January 1934 and the transfer of all Federal Reserve gold to the Treasury, President Roosevelt increased the official price of gold to $35 per ounce. The dollar became worth only 15.236 grains of gold nine-tenths fine, or just 59 percent of a dollar’s 1933 value in terms of its legal weight of gold. This generated a large dollar-denominated profit for the Treasury, a profit that would otherwise have belonged to the Fed. 

Since 1934, the US legal price of gold has been increased twice, but now bears no resemblance to gold’s market price. In 1972, the US legal price was raised from $35 to $38 per fine troy ounce. In 1973 it was raised again to $42.22. Today, the market price of gold is about $2,500 per ounce.

There are 480 grains of pure gold in a fine troy ounce. With gold at $2,500 per ounce, one US dollar is worth 0.192 grains of pure gold. In terms of grains of gold, a present-day US dollar buys less than 1% of the amount that a 1933 dollar would buy. Said differently, a penny in 1933 was worth more in terms of its weight in gold than a dollar is today.

In 1971, President Nixon severed the last tie between gold and the value of the US dollar by ending the post-World War II Bretton Woods agreement that gave foreign governments the option to redeem dollars for gold at the official price. Subsequently, Congress passed legislation repealing the sections of the Gold Exchange Act that made it illegal for Americans to own gold, and President Gerald Ford revoked Roosevelt’s 1933 executive order.

Central Banks and Gold

Federal Reserve notes, the circulating currency of the United States, by law, must still be fully collateralized by the Fed. But they are not redeemable for anything except for other Federal Reserve notes, an equivalent value in coins that have no intrinsic metallic value, or a deposit liability of the Fed.

The Fed’s founders would be appalled that the collateral backing US currency does not include any gold.

Many central banks have substantial investments in gold. According to the World Gold Council, the above-ground global stock of gold is approximately 212,582,000 kilograms, about 15.4 percent of which is owned by central banks and national treasuries. Many central banks have experienced significant gains from their holding of gold reserves as the market price of gold more than doubled in the past 6 years. In some cases, recent revaluation gains on central bank gold investments have offset losses on central banks’ investments in long-term fixed-rate bonds.

Source: Authors’ calculations. 2024* is the market price of gold on August 28, 2024. All other prices are year-end market closing prices of gold as reported by moneymetals.com.

According to a recent IMF Working Paper, central banks hold gold because it is “seen as a safe haven,” regarded as “respectable and confidence inspiring,” is liquid, provides portfolio diversification, has historically been a reliable store of value, a hedge against inflation, and a hedge against unanticipated systemic shocks to financial stability. In a 2023 interview, Aerdt Houben, Director of the Financial Markets Division of the Dutch National Bank, explained:

The beauty of gold is that … it retains its value. That’s one of the reasons why central banks hold gold. Gold has intrinsic value unlike a dollar or any other currency, let alone Bitcoin. … It’s a fungible product. It’s a liquid product, you can buy and sell it almost anywhere in the world. … Gold is like solidified confidence for the central bank. … If we ever unexpectedly have to create a new currency or a systemic risk arises, the public can have confidence in DNB because whatever money we issue, we can back it with the same value in gold. … If everything collapses, then the value of those gold reserves shoots up.

The IMF paper discusses how, in recent years, the central banks of Russia, China, India, and Turkey have purchased significant amounts of gold in response to US and allied nations’ financial sanctions. Sanctioned countries’ central banks face restrictions on selling reserves held in US dollars, Euro, and Yen securities. Gold held outside an owner’s country can be impounded. Sanctioned national central banks have responded by buying significant amounts of gold and holding it domestically.

Including gold as an instrument of open market operations would provide the Fed a means of increasing or decreasing bank reserves independent of any direct effect on market interest rates.

Can the Fed Own Gold Today?

The Fed owns no gold or other assets to hedge the interest rate risk of its long-maturity fixed-rate securities. The post-COVID 19 inflation required the Fed to substantially increase interest rates which generated more than $1 trillion in unrealized market value losses on its huge fixed-rate securities portfolio. In addition, it has nearly $200 billion in actual accumulated cash operating losses. With 20/20 hindsight, it is clear that the Federal Reserve System could have avoided some of these losses if, instead of investing only in fixed-rate long-term securities, it had diversified and included some gold in its investment portfolio. But could it have done so?

The current Federal Reserve Act as amended still explicitly states that every Federal Reserve Bank, in its open market operations, has the power “to deal in gold coin and bullion at home or abroad.” The provisions of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 which made it illegal for US persons, including the Federal Reserve, to hold gold for investment or monetary purposes were repealed long ago. Specifically, the Par Value Modification Act of 1973 repealed Sections 3 and 4 of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934—the sections that prohibited US citizens and Federal Reserve banks from buying and holding gold. Public Law 93-373, signed in August 1974, provided that, after December 31, 1974:

No provision of any law in effect on the date of enactment of this Act, and no rule, regulation, or order in effect … may be construed to prohibit any person from purchasing, holding, selling or otherwise dealing in gold in the United States or abroad.

Moreover, President Ford issued Executive Order 11825 on December 31, 1974, formally revoking President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 of 1933 which prohibited Americans from “hoarding” gold. The provisions of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 that suspend citizens’ right to redeem Federal Reserve notes for gold at the official price, however, remain in place.

Since the legal meaning of “any person” includes a Federal Reserve Bank, a plain language reading of the 1973–74 legislation suggests that Federal Reserve banks can today buy, hold, or sell gold without limitation in the course of their open market operations and have been able to do so since January 1, 1975.

Can the Fed today legally buy and hold gold? We think so, but thus far we have been unable to confirm our opinion in our discussions with former senior Fed officials and financial market experts—no one seems to know. Nor is this question answered in any of the official Federal Reserve materials of which we are aware and our query to the Fed’s official website remains unanswered. The answer to this question should not be a mystery. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve should speak authoritatively on the question and explain why the Fed can or cannot buy and sell gold in the course of conducting monetary policy.

If the Fed Can Own Gold, Should It?

The Federal Reserve is a unique central bank as the sole issuer of the world’s dominant fiat, or pure paper, currency. The global holding of fiat dollars is a great advantage to the US Treasury, famously and accurately characterized by the French in the 1960s as an “exorbitant privilege,” in financing the US government.

At the time of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the chief American negotiator, Harry Dexter White, argued, “To us and to the world, the United States dollar and gold are synonymous.” In 2024, the price of gold and the purchasing power of the US dollar are more like opposites. Does the Fed’s reluctance to hold gold reflect ideological resistance within the Fed and the Treasury to reestablish a distant link between gold and the US dollar, even if gold ownership offered advantages for the Fed’s and the country’s finances?

The Fed’s use of debt securities for open market operations has a direct impact on market interest rates, be they short-term Treasury, long-term Treasury, or repo rates, or the rates paid on government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. Including gold as an instrument of open market operations would provide the Fed a means of increasing or decreasing bank reserves independent of any direct effect on market interest rates. If conducted at scale, of course Fed gold dealings could impact the market price of gold and the revenues of gold producers.

One possible problem is that the US legal price of gold was set by statute more than 50 years ago. If the Fed bought gold at $2,500 per ounce, would it have to value gold on its financial statements at its legal price of $42.22 per ounce? Or would the Fed’s power to set its own accounting standards allow it to value gold at its current market price or at historical cost? In the future, when the Fed regains profitability, the accounting treatment of unrealized capital gains on gold would in part determine the Fed’s required remittances to the Treasury once the Fed’s surplus exceeds its legal maximum of $6.785 billion. Could the Fed, as do some other central banks, book gold at historical cost and retain unrealized gains as a “hidden reserve”? Conversely, how would the Fed account for unrealized decreases in the market price of gold?

It is curious that few experts seem to know for certain whether it is legal for the Fed to use gold as an instrument of open market operations. It is also puzzling why there is little if any discussion of the potential benefits or costs of using gold as a tool of monetary policy and as a Federal Reserve asset. We think these issues merit serious discussion.

How Can One Understand the Federal Reserve’s Nearly $200 Billion in Losses?

Published in The New York Sun.

Can you understand how it can be that the Federal Reserve, the world’s greatest and by far most important central bank, has now lost the astounding sum of $193 billion?  If not, one is surely not alone. Since September 2022, the Fed has lost money  every month.  These unprecedented losses continue, and this fall they will in the aggregate pass $200 billion.

The Fed has a powerful mystique, which it works hard at cultivating.  It intensely wants to be credible — that is, for you to believe in it (“credo” in Latin means I believe), and perhaps you do.  The people’s belief is an important source of the Fed’s power, and its power is a key source of the government’s power. 

We can accurately say that the Fed prints power by printing money.  The Fed does not want little things like $200 billion in losses to shake your belief — like the Wizard of Oz, it exclaims, “Pay no attention to that man,” or those losses, “behind the curtain.” It puts its losses behind an accounting curtain that pretends that losses are an asset.

These operating losses are not, as is sometimes mistakenly said, mere “paper” losses. They are real, cash losses. The Fed is suffering negative net interest income because its cost of funds is much greater than the income on its investments. The $193 billion in operating losses exceeds the Fed’s $43 billion in total capital by more than four times.

Thus at present, it has no earnings, no retained earnings, and no capital. In addition to that, it had a mark to market loss of over $1 trillion as of its June 30 financial statements. How can this be? How can the bank with the hugely profitable monopoly of issuing the world’s dominant reserve currency, be losing a fortune?

To understand the Fed, or any central bank, you have to divide it analytically into two different parts, and account for the functions and the profits of the two parts separately. The Fed does not do this, although the logic is classic and was already required for the Bank of England by the Bank Charter Act of 1844, also called “Peel’s Bank Act,” after Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister who promoted it. 

The Bank of England was divided by Peel’s Act into an Issue Department and a Banking Department. The idea at the time was to tie the paper currency firmly to gold. That has disappeared in both theory and practice, but the Bank of England still keeps its books according to this fundamental division of functions. So should the Fed.  

The Issue Function of the Fed exploits its government-granted monopoly of issuing the American currency. Its liabilities are the $2.3 trillion in currency outstanding, the paper dollars held not only in America, but all over the world. From a profitability point of view, these are wonderful liabilities for the central bank.

The currency is a non-interest bearing, perpetual, non-redeemable source of funds. The Issue Function’s assets are the $2.3 trillion in investments financed by the currency issued. These investments are typically government bonds.

Why is issuing currency so profitable?  If, in 2023, the Issue Function of the Fed had used its $2.3 trillion simply to buy Treasury bills, it would have received about a 5 percent yield. The result would have been interest expense of zero and interest income of $115 billion.

If operating expenses were $1 billion (a guess), the net profit would have been $114 billion. It looks like the Issue Function unwisely, or perhaps foolishly, invested its funds in long-term bonds at 2 percent, at the bottom of interest rates. Even so, it still had a profit of $45 billion in 2023.

The Federal Reserve as a whole lost $114 billion in 2023, the profits of the Issue Function notwithstanding.  That means that the Banking Function — i.e. the rest of the Fed, with its QE investments, mortgage securities, deposits, loans, expenses, and a lot of risk — actually lost the $114 billion plus the entire $45 billion profit from the Issue Function’s currency monopoly. Thus the Fed’s Banking Function for 2023 lost $159 billion — and that’s only for one year.

For the two years ending this September 30, I estimate the Fed’s Banking Function will have lost about $290 billion.  Quite a number, and the losses continue.  If the Fed were to adopt the two-department approach, it would help the Congress and the public understand what it is doing, with a hat tip to Sir Robert Peel.

BankThink The CFPB is funded by the Fed's profits. Trouble is, there are none

Read the article in American Banker here.

A US Bitcoin reserve would do much for Bitcoin and little for taxpayers

Published in The Hill with Paul H. Kupiec. Also Published in Real Clear Markets.

Speaking at the Nashville Bitcoin 2024 conference, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) floated a “revolutionary proposal” to make the federal government a Bitcoin investor. It is hard to imagine how this might benefit U.S. taxpayers or support the dollar’s value, but it certainly would raise the dollar price of Bitcoin.

While it is unsurprising that a plan to use taxpayer dollars to benefit foreign and domestic Bitcoin owners would have the Nashville audience cheering, it is impossible to justify. Neither the Federal Reserve nor the U.S. Treasury would want to or should be permitted to support Bitcoin’s price.

According to the accompanying statement issued by Lummis’s office, this proposal would create “a strategic Bitcoin reserve” of 1 million Bitcoins that the government would “would be required to hold … for 20 years.” We couldn’t have the government selling its Bitcoin and driving down the cryptocurrency’s price, now could we? 

This plan is as quintessentially American as a Louis L’Amour novel about mining the Comstock Lode. In 1878, owners of silver mines in places like Virginia City, Nev., succeeded in lobbying Congress to pass the Bland-Allison Act which required the government to support the price of silver by buying and stockpiling large amounts. 

Few ideas are new in politics or finance. Although a plan to force the federal government to buy something to support its price is hardly new, the proposed source of funds for these purchases is especially problematic.

In her Nashville remarks, Lummis said, “We will convert excess reserves at our 12 Federal Reserve banks into Bitcoin over five years. We have the money now!” 

 If by “excess reserves” Lummis means the “paid-in capital and surplus” of Federal Reserve district banks, as we have explained elsewhere, measured by generally accepted accounting standards, the Fed’s total paid-in capital and surplus account balance is negative $145 billion. Since September 2022, the Fed has had to borrow $145 billion just to fund its own expenses.

If the Fed is going to invest in Bitcoin, it would have to borrow even more money. Or it could sell some of its deeply underwater investments and book a big loss. Neither alternative makes sense. 

Even if the Fed did have positive paid-in capital and surplus funds available to invest, there is a more fundamental problem. The Federal Reserve Act, as a bedrock principle, restricts the Fed’s open market investments to U.S. government obligations or instruments guaranteed by the federal government or its agencies. This law would have to be amended to allow the Fed to purchase Bitcoin. 

If Congress did consider changing the act, other crypto coins and special interest assets would assuredly lobby Congress to be included as Fed-eligible investments. Such legislation would create enormous pressure to use the Fed’s monetary powers to purchase these assets, allocate credit and extend implicit subsidies. 

Additionally, holding Bitcoin would create a large operating loss for the Fed. Bitcoin pays no interest, but the Fed has to pay interest on the money it borrows to finance its investments. At current rates, every dollar borrowed to hold Bitcoin would cost the Fed 5.4 percent in annual interest. 

Suppose the Fed bought half a million Bitcoins at today’s price of about $60,000 each. At an interest cost of 5.4 percent, the Fed would incur operating cash losses of $1.6 billion a year on its Bitcoin investment. Over 20 years, the operating losses would total $32 billion, or more than 100 percent of the investment.

According to a report by CoinDesk, Lummis’s proposed Bitcoin Act of 2024 would also require the Treasury to revalue its gold stock and use the resulting capital gains to buy Bitcoin. We explained the mechanics of such a transaction in an article addressing the 2023 federal debt ceiling debate.

The current market price of gold is about $2,500 per ounce. The Treasury owns about 261.5 million ounces of gold. The Gold Reserve Act, amended in 1973, requires the Treasury to value its gold at $42.22 per ounce. At current market prices, the Treasury owns about $640 billion in gold but values it at a little over $11 billion. 

If the law were changed to force the Treasury to revalue its gold, it could issue $629 billion in new gold certificates to the Fed in return for dollars. This accounting transaction would create $629 billion in newly-printed dollars for the Treasury to spend. Using an accounting adjustment to create $629 billion for the Treasury to spend on Bitcoin is inflationary and does nothing to enhance the value of the U.S. dollar.

From a risk exposure perspective, any federal government investment in Bitcoin would be leveraged speculation on the price of a notoriously volatile intangible asset. 

Bitcoin enthusiasts and promoters have long claimed that Bitcoin will be an alternative to replace the dollar, allowing cryptocurrency users to escape the Fed, the Treasury and the U.S. government. Strategically, it’s extremely unlikely that the Fed and the Treasury will embrace this proposal as a cause to subsidize and promote.

The Treasury, in particular, reaps great advantages from the worldwide, massive holdings of U.S. dollar securities and currency — this is the famous “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the global reserve currency. It is central to financing the American government and American geopolitical power.  

It is pretty hard to imagine the Treasury wanting to invest in an alternative asset that seeks to weaken or even end its crucial advantages.

The Bitcoin proposal claims it would “bolster” and “fortify” the U.S. dollar, but truth be told, it is a plan to bolster the value of Bitcoin that provides no benefit for the the dollar. Once the facts are understood, no U.S. taxpayer without Bitcoins would support a proposal to use their tax dollars to bolster its price. 

A government Bitcoin reserve is just a bad idea.

FHLBs—Mission and Possible Improvements

Based on long experience and extensive study of various systems of housing finance and of financial systems generally, I respectfully offer the following thoughts on the mission of and possible improvements in the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs).

Mission

I think the mission of the FHLBs is to support, in key words of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, “sound and economical home finance,” by linking sound home finance nationwide to the bond market.  FHLBs’ principal activities should always be clearly tied to this mission, which should benefit tens of millions of mortgage borrowers throughout the country.

FHLB member institutions should be those which provide sound and economical home finance.  As markets evolve over time, which types of institutions are eligible membership should adapt to appropriately reflect this evolution.  For example, as commercial banks, originally excluded from FHLB membership, largely supplanted savings and loans in home finance, they were logically made eligible for FHLB membership by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989.

In my view, the FHLBs should take minimum credit risk, and all the credit risk of the mortgages they link to the bond market should be borne in the first place by the FHLB member financial institutions.  This is true of both FHLB advances, in which all the underlying assets stay on the books of the member, and for the fundamental concept of the FHLB Mortgage Partnership Finance program, in which the mortgage loan moves, but a permanent credit risk “skin in the game” stays for the life of the loan with the member institution, where it belongs.  Note that this is the opposite of selling loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in which the lending institution divests the credit risk of its own customer that results from its own credit decision.

Since the mission of the FHLBs is sound and economical home finance, their subsidizing affordable housing projects is secondary. In an economic perspective, these programs may be seen as a tax on the FHLBs, and in a political perspective, a tactic which allows members of Congress the convenience of creating subsidies without having to approve or appropriate the expenditures.

FHLBs without doubt have important benefits from their government sponsorship.  These benefits should primarily go to supporting sound and economical home finance provided by member institutions throughout the country.  

In the “mission” discussions, we can usefully distinguish between two groups of FHLB beneficiaries.  First are those who have also have skin in the game through having put their own money at risk by capitalizing, funding or financially backing FHLB operations.  They are the stockholder-members, the bondholders, and the U.S. Treasury.  Second are those who only receive subsidies from the FHLBs.

Suggested Improvements

1. The FHLBs should be given the formal power to issue mortgage-backed securities, provided these securities are always designed so that serious credit risk skin in the game remains with the member institutions.  This would give the FHLBs a very important additional method to carry out their mission and would be a long-overdue catching up with financial market evolution.

2. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act should be amended specifically to authorize the FHLBs to form a joint subsidiary to carry out functions best provided on a combined, national basis.  The participating FHLBs should own 100% of this joint subsidiary.  This addition to the FHLB Act is needed because of the requirements of the Government Corporations Control Act of 1945, enacted when the U.S. Treasury still owned some FHLB stock.  It has not owned any for 70 years, but the 1945 statutory requirement is still there.

3. The prohibition of captive insurance companies from being FHLB members should be promptly withdrawn.  In my view, this was not only a mistake, but inconsistent with the FHLB Act, which has provided from July 1932 to today that “insurance companies” in general, with no distinctions among them, are eligible for FHLB membership.  I believe that any change to that required Congressional action, which was not taken.  Any insurance company, including a captive insurance company, which provides sound and economical home finance should be eligible for FHLB membership.

I hope these ideas will be helpful for the ongoing success of the FHLBs.

Respectfully submitted to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, August 23, 2024

We Sure Do Need to Talk about Inflation

Published in National Review:

Writing for AIER, Alex Pollock has a superb review of a recent book by Stephen King: We Need to Talk about Inflation. Since that topic is very much on people’s minds these days and with true  believers in omnipotent government like Kamala Harris blaming it on greed and proposing price controls, the book is most welcome.

Pollock writes:

Reflecting on the enduring temptation of governments to inflate and depreciate their currencies, King rightly observes:

• “Inflation is very much a political process.”

• “Left to their own devices, governments cannot help but be tempted by inflation.”

• “Governments can and will resort to inflation.”

• “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” (Here he is quoting J.M. Keynes.)

Absolutely right. Rulers (whether monarchs, elected politicians, military despots, or any other kind) can be counted on to extract wealth from the citizenry to pay for the things they want to do, but prefer to extract it in a hidden fashion by cheapening the currency. And of course, they will try to pin the blame elsewhere.

This new book is must reading.