{"id":64759,"date":"2023-01-17T11:52:43","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T16:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64759"},"modified":"2023-01-17T11:52:43","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T16:52:43","slug":"the-fed-is-a-purely-political-institution-and-its-definitely-not-a-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64759","title":{"rendered":"The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It’s Definitely Not a Bank."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It’s Definitely Not a Bank.<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller\u2014Paul Volcker\u2019s immediate predecessor\u2014joked<\/a>\u00a0that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of those things, but there\u2019s also one other thing the Federal Reserve is not: an actual bank. It is simply a government agency that does bank-like things.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why many people might think it is a bank. \u201cBank\u201d is right there in the name of the twelve regional banks that make up the system: for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Fed also enjoys many titles that make it sound like a bank. It\u2019s sometimes called the \u201clender of last resort.\u201d Or it is sometimes called \u201ca banker\u2019s bank.\u201d Moreover, many people often call the Fed \u201cthe central bank.\u201d That phrase is useful enough, but not quite true.<\/p>\n

Moreover, even critics of the bank often repeat the myth that the Federal Reserve is \u201ca private bank,\u201d as if\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0were the main problem with the Federal Reserve. And then there are the economists who like to spread fairy tales about how the Fed is \u201cindependent\u201d from the political system and makes decisions based primarily on economic theory as interpreted by wise economists.<\/p>\n

The de facto reality of the Federal Reserve is that it is a government agency, run by government technocrats, that enjoys the benefits of being subject to very little oversight from Congress. It is no more \u201cprivate\u201d than the Environmental Protection Agency, and it is no more a \u201cbank\u201d than the US Department of the Treasury.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a Purely Political Institution<\/h4>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It’s Definitely Not a Bank. Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller\u2014Paul Volcker\u2019s immediate predecessor\u2014joked\u00a0that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,122,303,379,637,14776,25781,3650],"class_list":["post-64759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-banking","tag-central-bank","tag-fed","tag-government","tag-politics","tag-ryan-mcmaken","tag-the-mises-institute","tag-us-federal-reserve"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64760,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64759\/revisions\/64760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}