The Federal Reserve: love it or hate it

[edtost]

love it

imagine how [censored] we'd be if elected official's had the fed's power

[Brainwalter]

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love it

imagine how [censored] we'd be if elected official's had the fed's power

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Yeah that would suck. But that's not the only alternative. BTW do I have you confused for someone else or aren't you the Illuminati buff? I thought a conspiracy nut would hate the Fed.

[edtost]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
love it

imagine how [censored] we'd be if elected official's had the fed's power

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah that would suck. But that's not the only alternative. BTW do I have you confused for someone else or aren't you the Illuminati buff? I thought a conspiracy nut would hate the Fed.

[/ QUOTE ]

i think you have me confused with someone.

as good as it might be in theory, the us govt will never give up their power over monetary policy in the real world, so i can't really think of another alternative , and i'm much more comfortable with the fed than elected officials or a more standard govt agency, just because i feel like they're less likely to completely [censored] things up by being shortsighted.

[flight2q]

The Fed's ability to adjust money supply in response to economic conditions is much better than following some arbitrary rule (such as maintaining the dollar's exchange rate against major currencies we trade with, or heaven forbid against a basket of commodities).

The Fed seems to have done a competent job in managing interest rates post-Volcker, and a very good job of regulating banks after the initial blowout of the Reagan deregulation. They are also collecting and disseminating a lot of excellent economic information.

[spider]

Poll needs option to choose gold standard!

[r3vbr]

If dollars were based on gold, the supply of gold would not nearly be able to keep up with demand, and price of gold would soon skyrocket way beyond it's intrinsic value (wich it arguably already has at 700$ an ounce), and the situation would be the same as it is today (being that money is just faith in the government that it will somehow make this piece of paper be able to buy you goods in the future).

I think money should not be a "voucher for a certain weight in gold", it should be a voucher for a basket of commodities. Take everything traded at the CBOT and give it equally distributed weight in a standard "basket" of goods and 1 dollar should be equal to 1kg of that basket, or something like that.