Some say that Senator Paul should not hold up Fisher, or President Obama's other Fed nominations, since the Federal Reserve's Board only has two active members, and will soon be down to one member unless the Senate acts. These opponents of Senator Paul’s hold say that, while they support Auditing the Fed, the American economy will be damaged unless Congress quickly confirms President Obama's Fed nominees. Leaving aside the question of whether the American economy would really collapse without a Federal Reserve (SPOILER ALERT: IT WON'T, in fact if the Fed was handicapped from implementing QE 5, 6, 7.....the American economy would improve), it is not Senator Paul who is the obstructionist, but Senator Reid with his refusal to allow an up-or down vote on legislation supported by nearly 75 percent of the American people.
LatentStyleCount="267">
Senator Reid's refusal to vote on Audit the Fed is not the only reasons to oppose Stanly Fisher. When he was a professor at M.I.T. one of his star students was "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke. In fact, Fisher was an adviser of Bernanke's PhD thesis, which blamed the Great Depression on the Federal Reserve's failure to pump more money into the economy and bailout large financial institutions. But, as Murray Rothbard documented in his classic, America's Great Depression, the Depression was caused by the Fed's expansionist polices in the twenties and worsened by the interventionist polices of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.
Despite media portrayals of Fisher as somehow more "moderate" than Bernanke and Yellen, a look at his past statements and background shows that he is just as much as an inflationist as his prize pupil (experts from Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde by Frederick Sheene, read the whole article here):
LatentStyleCount="267">
- See more at: http://aucontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/mr-hyde-and-mr-hyde.html#sthash.1ebQX0iP.dpuf
LatentStyleCount="267">
A (Presumptive) Vice Chairman Fischer will press to gun inflation at a faster clip than even Janet Yellen would dare. Stanley Fischer is the most influential money printer in the world. His former students include Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King, Frederic Mishkin, and Mario Draghi. He is where he belongs.
Fischer is not a man of half measures. He has received much attention here, such as on October 13, 2011, "The 8% Solution." The more salient comments from that diatribe:
The following sequence is a lesson in how bureaucracies insinuate their failures into accepted policy.
Stanley Fischer, current Governor of the Bank of Israel, doctoral Ph.D. thesis adviser to Ben S. Bernanke and to Greg Mankiw (at MIT), with stops at every institution of impeccable prestige among the anointed (chief economist at the World Bank, Vice Chairman of Citigroup) professed in 1997 that: "The fundamental task of a central bank is to preserve the value of the currency." That is the first sentence in "Maintaining Price Stability," a paper published when Fischer was First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Five paragraphs later (wasting no time) Fischer wrote: "Barro (1995) and Sarel (1996) do not find clear negative relationship below 8 percent inflation..."
We can be sure the conclusion rested on the result of some computer model. Barro (1995) and Sarel (1996) cited as their authority Fischer (1993), which is noted later in Fischer (1997).
In 2001, IMF economic researchers Mohsin S. Khan and Abdelhak S. Senhadji wrote a staff paper "Threshold Effects in the Relationship between Inflation and Growth." The authors declare "irst identified by Fischer (1993)" , "inflation does not have a significant effect on growth, or it may even show a slightly positive effect." Note the change since the (1997) Fischer, from whom they quote: from "do not find clear negative relationship below 8 percent inflation," to "it may even show a slightly positive effect." This sequence was arranged by Sheehan (2011).
The press blurbs that appeared the morning of December 12, 2013, were designed to relieve the wary of concerns that Professor Fischer might be an inflationist. The Washington Post fell in line: "y September 2009 Fischer was raising interest rates." This was as head of the Bank of Israel. What was happening in Israel at that moment has not been investigated, but Israel does not have the ability to print money with abandon. (It has in the past, and suffered.) The United States is the reserve currency of the world that lifts all ships during a storm (so far), including Israel's.
In fact, on March 17, 2008, Bank of Israel headmaster Stanley Fischer offered Ben Bernanke advice in a Bloomberg interview. "You can inject liquidity into the economy and Ben Bernanke is an expert on this issue."
Later: "That the Fed will get on top of this, I don't doubt."
And: "Ben Bernanke is an outstanding economist."
We might surmise Ben Bernanke would only remain a great economist if he conjured a few trillion dollars into existence. (He has.)
The Bloomberg reporter expressed concerns to which the central planner replied in central-banker jive: "Fischer rejected the view that the Fed was orchestrating a bailout that would encourage investors to take greater risk in the future."
There is not a chance Fischer believed this. What else were they going to other than chase bond, stock, and post-human art markets?
The theoretician loftily claimed Bernanke would raise interest rates "long before inflation got out of hand." Of course, Fischer had no idea what Bernanke would or could do, since no central banker (nor anyone else) knows how to exit. At first, Dr. Jekyll could change back from Mr. Hyde, but then, could only remain Mr. Hyde.
The Bloomberg story was published at a dire moment. Bear Stearns had failed. Its carcass was purchased by J.P. Morgan on March 16, 2008. It is not a coincidence the professor who understood the inflationary end game in 1980 reminded his lifelong tenured servant of what to do. (Go forth and multiply.)
Campaign for Liberty members opposed to considering the Fisher nomination without having a vote on Audit the Fed--and opposed to considering David Barron's nomination until the Obama administration releases Barron's memos justifying President Obama's extrajudicial targeted killings of several American citizens overseas -- should call their Senators and tell them to vote no on cloture motions for Fisher and Barron.
Print 
PDFTags: Audit the Fed, Rand Paul