How Many Mandates Does the Fed Have? How Many Can It Achieve?

 Written Testimony of 

Alex J. Pollock

Resident Fellow

American Enterprise Institute 

To the Committee on Financial Services

U.S. House of Representatives

Hearing on “The Many Mandates of the Fed”

December 12, 2013 

How Many Mandates Does the Fed Have?  How Many Can It Achieve?

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Waters, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit this written testimony.  I am Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where I focus on financial policy issues, and these are my personal views.  Before joining AEI, I was the President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004.  I have published numerous articles on banking and financial systems, including the role of the Federal Reserve and central banks in general.

My discussion has two main themes: 

1. Discretionary fiat-currency central banking is subject to high uncertainty.  Therefore the attempts of central banks to “manage” financial and economic stability are inevitably subject to mistakes, and recurring big mistakes.  The naive belief that any central bank, or anybody, could actually know enough about the future, and in particular about the future of complex, recursive globalized economies and financial markets, to be an economic “Maestro”, is a fundamental error.

2. While the Federal Reserve is often said to have a “dual mandate,” which would be difficult enough, it fact it has six mandates.  The combination of these mandates has created in the Fed a remarkable concentration of power.  But the Fed does not, and because the future is unknowable, cannot, succeed at all its mandates.   

Uncertainty and the Lack of Knowledge

In the early 21st century, the Fed and other central bankers gave themselves great credit for having engineered what they thought they observed: the so-called “Great Moderation.”  But the Great Moderation turned out to be the Era of Great Bubbles.  The U.S., in successive decades, had the Tech Stock Bubble and then the disastrous Housing Bubble.  In addition, other countries had destructive real estate and government debt bubbles. 

Presiding over the Era of Great Bubbles as Chairman of the world’s principal central bank from 1987 to 2006, was Alan Greenspan, a man of high intelligence and wide economic knowledge, with scores of subordinate Ph.D. economists to build models for him.  He was then world famous as “The Maestro,” for supposedly being able to always orchestrate the macro economy to happy outcomes.  In reality, the idea that anyone, no matter how talented, could be such a Maestro is absurd, but it was widely believed nonetheless, just as the idea that national house prices could not fall was widely believed.

In his new book, Chairman Greenspan relates, with admirable candor, that at the outset of the financial crisis in August, 2007, “I was stunned.”  He goes on to discuss the failure of the Fed to anticipate the crisis.  For example: “The model constructed by the Federal Reserve staff combining the elements of Keynesianism, monetarism and other more recent contributions to economic theory, seemed particularly impressive,” but “the Federal Reserve’s highly sophisticated forecasting system did not foresee a recession until the crisis hit.  Nor did the model developed by the prestigious International Monetary Fund. 

Even extremely complex models are abstract simplifications of reality and they do not do well with discontinuities like the panicked collapse of bubbles, so it is not surprising that “leading up to the almost universally unanticipated crisis of September, 2008, macromodeling unequivocally failed when it was needed most, much to the chagrin of the economics profession,” as Greenspan writes.

Central banking is not and cannot be a science, cannot operate with determinative mathematical laws, cannot make reliable predictions of an ineluctably uncertain and unknowable future.  We should have no illusions about the probability of success of such a difficult attempt as central banks’ “managing” economic and financial stability, no matter how intellectually impressive its practitioners may be.  “We did not anticipate that the decline in house prices would have such a broad-based effect on the stability of the financial system,” as another impressive intellect, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, has admitted.

Before the Era of Great Bubbles, a vast Federal Reserve mistake was the Great Inflation of the 1970s, under the Fed chairmanship of distinguished economist Arthur Burns, when annual inflation rates in the U.S. got to double digit levels.  In the aftermath of this decade of inflation was a series of financial crises of the 1980s, involving among other things, the failure of 2,237 U.S. financial institutions between 1983 and 1992, and the international sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s.  The Great Inflation was created by the Fed itself and its money printing exertions of those days.

In the next decade, the 1980s, with some success and by imposing a lot of pain, the Fed undertook “fighting inflation”—the inflation it had itself caused.  In the 2000s, it performed a variation on this pattern: the Fed first stoked the asset price inflation of the colossal Housing Bubble, then worked hard to bail out the Bubble’s inevitable collapse.

The Fed and other fiat-currency central banks are in the money illusion business, trying to affect the costs of real resources by depreciating the currency they issue at more or less rapid rates, by money creation and financial market manipulations.  The business of money illusion often turns into the business of wealth illusion, since central banks can and do fuel asset price inflations.  Asset inflations of bubble proportions create “wealth” that will evaporate.

Asset price inflation can be intentional on the part of the Fed when it is trying to bring about ”wealth effects,” as it did with the housing boom in 2001-2004 and is now doing again with so-called “quantitative easing,” including its unprecedented $1.5 trillion mortgage market manipulation.

Future financial histories will reflect something their authors will know, but we cannot: what the outcome of the Bernanke Fed’s massive interventions in the long-term government debt and mortgage markets will have been.  About this at present we, and the Federal Reserve itself, can only guess.  In the 1920s, the then-dominant personality in the Fed, Benjamin Strong, famously decided to give the stock market a “little coup de whiskey.”  The current Fed has given the bond and mortgage markets a barrel of whiskey, in a way which would have astonished previous generations of Fed governors, and have been utterly unimaginable to the authors of the Federal Reserve Act.

The final outcome of this intervention will probably render the Bernanke Fed in future histories as either a great hero or else as a great bum.  The probability distribution appears to me as bimodal, with nothing in between.  It represents a remarkable central banking gamble—one which without doubt has greatly increased the interest rate risk of the entire financial system, as well as of the Fed’s own balance sheet.  It reflects the ultimate in discretionary central banking with multiple mandates. 

How Many Mandates?

We constantly hear, not least from the Fed itself, about how it has a “dual mandate” of price stability and maximizing employment.  Experts have debated whether the Fed or any central bank can achieve balancing these two mandates successfully.  This question much oversimplifies the problem, for the Fed has not two mandates, but six.

To begin with, the provision of the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977 that gives rise to all the talk of a dual mandate actually assigns the Fed three mandates.  It provides that the Fed shall: “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”  Obviously, that is three goals—a triple mandate, not a dual mandate.  However, the “moderate long-term interest rates” idea, perhaps because it is impractical, usually gets conveniently left out.

In addition, the Fed has three more mandates.  Two are from the original 1913 Act: to provide an elastic currency, and to regulate and promote financial stability.  The final mandate is the real essence of central banking: to finance the government as needed.

That makes six mandates.  How is the Fed doing on each?  Can it ever be expected to achieve them all? 

Let us start with “stable prices.”  This mandate in its literal sense was dropped by the Fed long ago and is now a dead letter.  The Fed’s frequently announced goal is not stable prices, but a relatively stable rate of increase in prices, with a target of 2% inflation a year, continuing indefinitely.  Bluntly put, the Fed is committed to perpetual inflation (although I cannot recall seeing it use this honest term) at a rate which will cause average prices to quintuple in the course of an average lifetime. With a straight face, the Fed and other central bankers call this “price stability”—a remarkable example of Orwellian newspeak.  While it is confused on the actual legal mandate, a recent article discussing the Fed in Barron’s correctly describes the current practice: “Half of its dual mandate, inflation.”  

A classic rationale for inflation is that real wages can be reduced without reducing nominal wages, and that real debts can be reduced without (as much) default on nominal debts.  Nonetheless, it is my opinion that the current commitment of the Fed and other fiat-currency central banks to perpetual inflation will be judged in the long run as inconsistent with financial stability, and instead part of the decades of financial instability which began in the 1970s.  However that may be, price stability is what we intentionally don’t have.

When the goal of “maximum employment” was added to the governing statute in 1977, many people, including the Democratic sponsors of the bill, believed there was a simple-minded trade-off between inflation and employment.  Shortly after enactment of this mistaken idea, the stagflation of the late 1970s demonstrated its error.  No one believes it now, but its presence in statute gives the Fed much increased power to exercise inherently uncertain discretionary central banking.

Within a few years of enactment of the “moderate long-term interest rates” mandate, the Fed was pushing interest rates to all-time highs, with the 10-year Treasury interest rate reaching 15% in the early 1980s.  This was hardly a “moderate” rate, to be sure. 

The history of the Fed and manipulation of long-term rates is instructive.  During the 1940s, the Fed was a big buyer of long-term government bonds to finance World War II and to suppress the cost of borrowing for the U.S. Treasury.  This was a major precedent considered by Chairman Bernanke for “quantitative easing.”  After the war, the Fed continued to hold down interest rates; at length it was debated whether it should.  President Truman and his Treasury Secretary thought it should, but in the 1951 “Accord,” the Treasury and the Fed agreed the purchases would end.  In the ensuing three decades, interest rates kept rising, making a 30-year bear bond market, until their 1980s peak.

Now we have had an equivalent three-decade long bull bond market and the Fed, of course, is again a big buyer of bonds.  It has again been a success at manipulating long-term interest rates downward, to near zero or even negative real rates.  That is also not a “moderate” interest rate.

Of far greater seniority and standing is the fourth mandate of the Fed, which stood very first in the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.  The legislative fathers of the Fed told us clearly what they wanted to achieve.  The original Act begins:

     “An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency….”

In 1913, an elastic currency meant the ability to make loans from the Federal Reserve Banks to expand credit and print money to match the economic exigencies of the moment, whether reflecting the agricultural seasons, the business cycle or a financial panic.  In the background was the experience of the Panic of 1907.  One hundred years after that, in the Panic of 2007 to 2009, elastic currency was furnished with great energy by the Fed.  Although the panic is over, the elastic currency is still very expanded, now called “quantitative easing.”

As intended by the original Federal Reserve Act, an elastic currency is most certainly what we have got, not only in the U.S., but given the global role of the dollar, in the world.  That is one mandate fully achieved.  It is, as designed, very helpful in panics, but it also fits well with the more recent goal of perpetual inflation.

The fifth mandate is expressed in the beginning of the Federal Reserve Act as “to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States,” now also thought of as ensuring financial stability.  Although it was hoped at the creation of the Fed that it would make financial crises “mathematically impossible,” in fact in the one hundred years since then there have been plenty of crises, right up to the most recent one.  The Fed has full command of a very elastic currency, but the crises keep happening.  “Financial crises will always be with us,” as Bernanke has written, “That is probably unavoidable.”  I believe that is correct, optimistic hopes about the most recent expansion of the Fed’s supervisory power notwithstanding.

If only the governors, officers and staff of the Fed could know the future!  Then they could doubtless avoid the crises.  Since they do not and cannot know the future, it is plausibly argued that instead they help cause the crises by discretionary money creation and financial interventions which induce debt, leverage, asset inflation and illusory “wealth,” with recurring unhappy endings. 

The sixth and most basic central bank mandate of all is financing the government when needed.  In the 1940s, the Fed was the willing servant of the Treasury Department in order to finance the war and hold down the Treasury’s interest cost.  At three years old, it had lent its full efforts to finance the government during the First World War.  It is monetizing Treasury bonds as we discuss it.  So convenient a thing it is for a government to have a central bank that almost every government has one. 

This fundamental relationship is exemplified in the deal which formed the quintessential central bank, the Bank of England, in 1694.  The deal was that the Bank would lend money to the government, in exchange it got a monopoly in the issuance of currency.  This is still the basic structure of the Fed’s balance sheet.  Equally instructive is the founding of the Bank of France in 1800: “Bonaparte…felt that the Treasury needed money, and wanted to have under his hand an establishment which he could compel to meet his wishes”—a natural political desire.   

Hence the ambivalence of Federal Reserve “independence.”  As William McChesney Martin, Fed Chairman in the 1950s and 1960s, said, the Fed is independent “within the government.”

Yet it is true that “the Fed has also become a colossus,” as the provocative historian of the Fed, Bernard Shull, has written.  The combined six mandates, whether or not successfully achieved, make what Shull calls “an enormous concentration of power in a single Federal agency that is more autonomous than any other and one in which a single individual, the Chairman, has assumed an increasingly important role.”

The accumulated power of the Fed gives it the greatest potential to create systemic financial risk of any institution in the world, while it is claiming and trying to reduce systemic risk.  This fact alone warrants the review of the Federal Reserve and its many mandates which the Committee has wisely undertaken.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share these views.