A century of central banking: what have we learned?

• Author: Jordan, Jerry L.

All of us who are interested in the century-long experience of central banking in the United States owe a great debt to Allan Meltzer. His several-years-long efforts gave us over 2,000 pages of careful documentation of decisionmaking in the Federal Reserve for the first 75 years (Meltzer 2003, 2010a, 2010b). The first score of years transformed a lender-of-last-resort, payments processor, and issuer of uniform national currency into a full-fledged central bank with discretionary authority to manage a flat currency.

Even in the mid-1930s, then Senator Carter Glass declared that we did not have a central bank in the United States. However, legislation in 1933 and 1935 had institutionalized tire Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which had previously been an informal coordinating committee.

In an interview several years before his death, Milton Friedman was asked about any regrets in his long career. He replied that he wished he had paid more attention early on to what Jim Buchanan had been saying about the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats (Friedman 2003). Any discussion about any institution of government can be fruitful only in the context of the public-choice elements of decisionmaking by individuals who occupy policymaking positions. For the past century, the economic theories of prominent personalities in the central bank's policymaking bodies have been the dominant factors giving us the very mixed results we have witnessed.

Dead-End Debates

In 60-plus years since the Accord in 1951, the U.S. central bank has gone full-circle from being a de facto bureau of the U.S. Treasury, to an "independent" monetary authority, and back to a bureau of die Treasury. Of course, the long period of "even-keeling" demonstrated that the Fed's independence was always more in rhetoric than reality (Cargill and O'Driscoll 2013). The debates about free reserves versus net-borrowed reserves, targets versus indicators, monetary versus fiscal policy, the Phillips Curve, monetary aggregate targeting, and econometric modeling have come and gone within a decade or two. The emergence and demise of those debates over the past several decades--about how to reform and improve the formulation and execution of monetary policies by committee--have left us after 100 years questioning the concept of central banking and monopoly monetary authorities. In this article, I address a series of issues about central banking.

Moral Hazard

The existence of central banks with discretionary powers in a fiat currency world creates moral hazard in the financial system. Because of tire explicit and implicit "safety net" offered by the existence of central banks, private financial institutions cannot be observed behaving as they would in absence of moral hazard. Because of moral hazard in the financial system--privatization of gains from risky decisions and socialization of the losses--the trend has been toward evermore regulations and calls for closer supervision of financial companies. The resulting "permission-and-denial" regime opens ever wider the door to cronyism in the financial system.

For many years it has been recognized that "too big to fail" is a large and growing problem. In more recent years, more people are also beginning to understand that "too politically well-connected and powerful to effectively supervise" has become a major obstacle to meaningful financial system reforms. For the biggest banks, the political action committees are more important than the credit policy committees.

Moral hazard also emerges in other institutions of government as a result of the presence of central banks with discretionary powers. It is evident in a lessening of political pressures on tax and regulatory authorities of government to undertake the difficult decisions and actions that would enhance the "magic of the marketplace" and foster growth. Even when most observers recognize that the "sand in the gears" preventing more robust economic prosperity arises from the regulatory and tax policies of government, the mistaken belief that monetary actions can overcome those obstacles results in an adverse mix of policies by government. Economists should understand that monetary authorities cannot correct the mistakes of the rest of government. But, as we have seen, politicians have strong incentives to blame the central bank when the economy is not doing well, but take all the credit when employment is high and inflation is low.

The Myth of Central Bank Independence

Central banks and ministries of finance are not able to resist the political pressures to alter the stance of policies in response to crises. Who would want to be the secretary of the Treasury or chairman of the Fed that is blamed for another Great Depression? Moreover, once central banks make the mistake of engaging in quasi-fiscal actions in futile attempts to correct mistakes of the rest of government, there is no feasible exit strategy that does not involve collateral damage. When economic activity is constrained or adversely impacted by government's anti-supply-side taxation and regulatory actions, central banks come under great pressure to engage in demand-side monetary actions as a counter measure. That mistake cannot be reversed without negative consequences. "Soft-landing" is a myth.

An argument can be made that the institutional setting of the European Central Bank gives it more independence than any other central bank because it does not have a single ministry of finance or single parliament to answer to. National central banks are in the position that former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin liked to describe as "independent within government." Another former Fed chairman, Arthur Bums, asserted on occasion, "We dare not exercise our independence for fear of losing it." As the Fed celebrates its centennial, politicians have come to view it as an activist instrument of economic policymaking responsible for pursuing multiple objectives of financial stability, employment, output, low interest rates, and tolerable inflation--all with the single tool of the power to create fiat currency.

Rules versus Discretion

The FOMC is institutionally designed to exercise discretion rather than adopt and follow rules in the formulation of policy actions. A schedule of committee meetings every six weeks to reconsider the stance of policy causes deliberations to focus on recently reported data and recently revised forecasts of future economic activity. The 1933 and 1935 legislations "fixing" the FOMC as a separate, legal, government body--without budget, staff, buildings, or any other identifiable characteristics of a government entity--created a "monetary authority" to formulate and...