Dear Fed,

We have come to a point in time where you are causing more harm than good.  For decades, your role as not only the central bank to the US, but to the entire financial world helped ensure confidence in a fiat economy.  Central control of a nation’s monetary system is undoubtedly an incredibly important role.  You know this.  After all, you were created in 1913 in response to systemic banking crises and failures in the years prior.  You were created to prevent crises from happening.

Damage control was always key to your central mission from the very start, achieved through the “dual mandate” of maximizing employment and stabilizing prices.  However, in time you became much more than the organization which was tasked with controlling monetary policy.  Rather than respond to shocks, you actually became the reason for shocks by believing you had so much power that you could control boom and bust cycles.  More importantly, you believed you could predict the future by creating it.

It doesn’t take much analysis to prove that you have no control over the future. While your former Chairman, Bernanke, claimed to have the “courage to act,” somehow all of the tomes of economic research and analysis, and all of that belief that you had control caused you to completely miss the housing bubble and conditions that led up to one of the greatest economic crises since your very founding.  While you can deny this all you want, video interviews by Ben Bernanke clearly prove otherwise (click here to jog your memory).  Words matter.

The very fact that you, as an institution, come across so definitive in your omnipotence is wildly damaging to long term wealth creation and the stability you are supposed to create.  How many of the herd blindly believed Bernanke’s words?  Kept taking risk?  Kept believing that if things went awry that the Fed would be able to swoop in and save the day?  How much wealth was lost not because of the crisis, but because of the complacency your words created by human beings who crave the illusion of certainty and simply want to believe?  The mantra of “don’t fight the Fed” has lost more money for investors than realized despite the selective application of that saying to bull markets.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email