Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> We should have a federal reserve, but one who doesn't engage in central planning and has a healthy respect for the efficacy of free markets.

The entire purpose of a central bank is to do central planning of monetary policy, so I'may not sure what a federal reserve that doesn't do central planning even means.

> If they raised rates fully in 2011-2013 they would've been heros, now they've completely distorted the global economy because prices simply cannot reflect information about the economy when money itself so widely fluctuates.

It sounds like you want them to do central planning, but optimizing different variables (rather than managing inflation against full employment, it sounds like you want them optimizing the much less clearly measurable degree to which prices reflect information about the economy.)

I'm also not sure what "raise rates fully" is supposed to mean; there isn't a fixed ceiling on rates.

Further, I'd like to see some reason to believe that your preferred policy would actually have produced better results by any concrete measure.

> I'm not really making an argument for institutional changes, just that the people currently occupying the fed are benevolent morons.

Well, you are clearly saying that. Some kind of support for that claim would be nice before calling it an argument.

Their job is to act a lender of last resort, not to centrally plan the economy despite what you think. They have as of only past couple decades taken on the latter role of central planning.

MV=PT

What you see above is central basis by which to interoperate all of the fed's behavior.

The above equation roughly translates to:

(Money supply) * (Turnover rate) = (Price) * (Transactions)

where: -money supply is outstanding cash or dollars -turn over rate is the frequency in which the cash changes hands = All the transactions that took place and their price

Current dogma of keynesian academic economists is that an ability to control the money supply will affect the rest of the equation and in theory the real economy. So (Money supply) is the variable the fed can control they use to pull the levers of our economy.

What's implied here then is a gross misunderstanding of what money actually is: a means of instrumentation and measurement.

For economies to properly function, entrepreneurs and participants in the economy need a consistent and reliable gauge to measure the performance of their (economic) experiments.

When supply of money in relation to other "things" is constantly and artificially manipulated, it becomes near impossible for the prices of goods and services to reflect actual information about fundamentals, comparative advantages, etc.

If you're technically inclined, I am essentially making an argument from the perspective of information theory.

Claude Shannon basically showed that to convey information, you need a medium that stays constant. Without that, it's impossible to distinguish the "medium" from the "message".

This is precisely what our academic oriented economists in charge of the fed and our prevailing economic school of thought have fucked up: They've tried to send a message through the medium itself in an attempt to activate parts of the economy, and have completely fooled themselves into thinking that while socialism and command economies are bad, control of the money supply is somehow different.

The issue is what people don't realize, is that free markets aren't about free exchanges of goods and services, but about free exchanges of information. And through the temptations and hubris of central planning they've compromised the medium through which participants in the economy can exchange information.

> Their job is to act a lender of last resort, not to centrally plan the economy despite what you think

The historical purpose of an independent central bank is to provide credibility to the currency (and, by way of that, also to provide some credibility to debt, especially government debt, denominated in the currency) by centrally planning monetary policy, and doing so at armsome length from the fiscal policy of the government.

The job of the Federal Reserve, specifically, as laid out in law expressly includes managing monetary policy with specific prioroties regarding productivity, employment, and inflation -- that is, within certain parameters management of the economy via monetary policy.

So, factually, you are wrong, no matter whatn ideologically, you think their job should be.

> What's implied here then is a gross misunderstanding of what money actually is: a means of instrumentation and measurement.

Money is a number of things, but while it's something of a very loose proxy measure for somethings, this is, historically, neither the primary intended purpose, nor the primary practical function of money.

> When supply of money in relation to other "things" is constantly and artificially manipulated, it becomes near impossible for the prices of goods and services to reflect actual information about fundamentals, comparative advantages, etc.

Insofar as this is true at all, it's just as true if the changes are due to forces other than central planning. And no matter what you use as money, and how you manage it, it's supply in relation to other goods and services is going to change.

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