Mad Hawk Disease Strikes Federal Reserve

“A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

– Ernest Hemingway


Image: Magalle L’Abbe via Flickr

Longtime readers know I am not the Federal Reserve’s #1 fan. I can’t recall ever resting easy, confident that the Fed was ably looking out for our economy and banking system. However, I have experienced varying degrees of skepticism and distrust. I must also acknowledge that we are all still here despite the Fed’s many mistakes.

Once or twice a year the Fed rekindles my frustration and concern with a particularly boneheaded statement or policy change. Last summer, the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium outraged and saddened me at the same time – which, given my emotional makeup, is quite an accomplishment. I shared my rage with readers in “Monetary Mountain Madness.” Feel free to read it again if you enjoy a good rant. I would have been even more depressed if I had known that one of the academic presenters there, Marvin Goodfriend of Carnegie Mellon University, an unabashed cheerleader for NIRP, would appear on the short list of candidates for Donald Trump’s first two appointments to the Fed.

Goodfriend is nominally a monetarist, but he doesn’t quack or waddle like any monetarist I know. The session that he presented was entitled “Negative Nominal Interest Rates.” In the first paragraph of the first section of his paper, he says that “[M]y current paper makes the case for unencumbering interest rate policy so that negative nominal interest rates can be made freely available and fully effective as a realistic policy option in a future crisis.”

So the first appointment to the Fed that Donald Trump will reportedly make is an unabashed advocate of negative interest rates as a policy option. It doesn’t sound like Trump wants a Fed that is modeled on the far more disciplined principles of a Richard Fisher or a Kevin Warsh.

While my rant last summer was about the Fed’s apparent willingness to embrace negative rates, we now face the opposite risk. Janet Yellen & Co. are asserting that inflation is such a serious threat that they must tighten policy with a two-pronged approach. They are already raising the federal funds rate and will soon begin reducing the massive bond portfolio accumulated in the QE years.

I don’t think these moves will create a crisis on their own. Rather, I think the mentality that they reveal may lead to much bigger mistakes when the next recession arrives. The mistakes may already be unfolding.

Here’s my key question: Is the Fed really as “data-dependent” as Yellen and others say, or do other factors influence them? I think the latter. You’ll see the other factors in a little bit.