I saw your article on the Federal Reserve. It was a great article, helping get some clarity, but it is old. It is dated 1995. Have you changed any of your views on this?
Thanks,
Michael
Probably this is the specific article.
Why should Cecil have changed his views? They were right then and they’re right now.
If Cecil were the kind of person who prefers to believe the same thing on Wednesday as he believed on Monday (regardless of what happened on Tuesday), then I suppose there’s no point in even asking what happened on Tuesday. Just reprint Monday’s newspaper, hmm?
Sure, if you don’t bother to read the article I guess you can say any bizarre thing about it you want.
For the rest of us, the article merely states why the Fed exists in the form it does. It doesn’t address the actions of the Fed. (Well, he does say that printing up enough money to pay off the debt is crazy. It is crazy. If you disagree with that, there’s no talking to you.) History is history.
A good source for understanding why the Fed was created in the form it was is Roger Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve.
You want to bother to read the article and then articulate what you think is wrong with it, I’ll discuss that with you all day long. Otherwise…
I just read this book and it is indeed excellent, though it only covers the formation of the original Fed structure in 1913 and doesn’t go much into the structural reforms under FDR, the changes due to Bretton Woods, or the end of the gold standard, all of which significantly altered the way the Fed does business.
For a somewhat more academic treatment of how the Fed works, I also recommend Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. If you can get past his extremely loquaciously verbose and repetitively redundant prose, it has some great insights into the Fed’s formal and informal power structure.
If nothing changed on Tuesday, then what was true on Monday is also true on Wednesday.
I suppose the OP could be talking about quasi-valuation statements like “it was done that way for your own good” and “The Fed’s ingenious system of monetary controls means it [runaway inflation] can’t happen here, at least not as easily.” He’s probably hoping that Cecil will reconsider given the Fed actions of the last 10 years. Since those Fed actions have been largely effective the OP is going to be disappointed.
Hey, don’t forget all those people who have been predicting inflation every day since 2008. And one day they’ll be right!
But I have no idea at all what the OP was complaining about. I wonder if we’ll ever find out.
Well, I’d like to think that Cecil’s view on the matter of whether or not the current Fed chairman is Alan Greenspan has probably evolved in the intervening years.
I resemble that remark. 
That is absolutely true. Buy how would you know that nothing changed on Tuesday if you don’t ask what happened on Tuesday?
For the record, I have no problems with Cecil’s column. But I support zubenal’s right to ask questions and I don’t think those questions should be instantly dismissed.
Of course, nobody dismissed any questions. We want to know what the question is. You haven’t answered that, because you can’t know the answer.
Once again, Cecil’s column discussed why the Fed was set up the way it was. We might have learned something totally new about that process, but in fact we haven’t and generally speaking that is not a process that should be addressed by what happened on Tuesday.