Alex J. Pollock



Articles by Alex J. Pollock

The Fed Doesn’t Know the Natural Rate of Interest

Published in The Wall Street Journal:Mr. Levy describes the Fed’s permanent problem: It doesn’t and can’t know what the natural rate of interest is. Everyone should pity the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, who must inwardly confess that they can’t know the answers, yet have to play their parts in the Fed melodrama nonetheless.Alex J. PollockSenior fellow, Mises InstituteLake Forest, Ill.Appeared in the March 14, 2024, print edition as ‘Fed Doesn’t Know the Natural Rate of Interest’.

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Central Banks and Housing Finance

Although manipulating housing finance is not among the Federal Reserve’s statutory objectives, the U.S. central bank has long been an essential factor in the behavior of mortgage markets, for better or worse, often for worse. 

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How to Reform the Fed

Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Auburn, Alabama, 12-14 October 2023.
Sponsored by Bob Tancula.

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Lots of Red Ink at the Fed

The Federal Reserve has officially reported a loss of $57 billion for the first six months of 2023. Quite a number! So the “Federal Reserve Banks Combined Quarterly Financial Report as of June 30, 2023” (CQFR)—a little-known document—is especially notable for its red ink. We can anticipate an annual loss of over $100 billion for 2023 and for the losses to continue into 2024. 1
How does a central bank, especially the world’s greatest and most important central bank, lose tens of billions of dollars in six months? An average person, influenced by the mystique of the Fed, might understandably be baffled by this fact.
To understand what is happening, we need to recall that in addition to being a media star as the manipulator of the world’s dominant currency, the Federal Reserve is a bank—well,

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Will the Fed Ever Relinquish Its New Powers?: The Fed’s “Cincinnatian Problem”

In times of banking and financial crises, central banks always intervene. This is not a law of nature, but it is an empirical law of central bank behavior. The Federal Reserve was created 110 years ago specifically to address banking panics by expanding money and credit when needed, by providing what was called in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 an “elastic currency,” so it could make loans in otherwise illiquid markets, when private institutions can’t or won’t.
The great Victorian banking thinker (as well as private banker) Walter Bagehot proposed that the Bank of England “lend freely” to quell a panic, and the central banks of the world today are all his disciples in this respect. With the post–Bretton Woods, pure-fiat-currency Federal Reserve, the US currency is elastic with a

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The Fed’s Capital Goes Negative

The Federal Reserve’s new report of its balance sheet shows that in the approximately six months ended March 29 it has racked up a remarkable $44 billion of cumulative operating losses. That exceeds its capital of $42 billion, so the capital of the Federal Reserve System has gone negative to the tune of $2 billion—just in time for April Fools’ Day.
This event would certainly have surprised generations of Fed chairmen, governors, and, we’d have thought, newspapermen. The Fed’s capital will keep getting more negative in April and for some long time to come, at least if interest rates stay at anything like their current level. The Fed in the first quarter of 2023 reported losses running at the rate of $8.7 billion a month.
On an annual basis that would be a loss of over $100 billion.

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The Second Housing Bubble of the 21st Century Is Over

[Originally published in the Housing Finance International Journal.]
The 21st century, only 23 years old, has already had two giant, international housing bubbles. It makes one doubt that we are getting any smarter with experience.
Among the countries involved in the second bubble, both the U.S. and Canada fully participated in the newest rampant inflation of house prices. Prices this time reached levels far above those of the last boom peak. In the U.S., the S&P/Case-Shiller National House Price Index by mid-2022 had risen to 67% over its 2006 bubble peak (130% over its 2012 trough). In Canada, the Teranet-National Bank House Price Index had soared to 143% over its 2008 peak (168% over its 2009 trough). What the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada both wrought with their hyper-low

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The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center.

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Since 2008, Monetary Policy Has Cost American Savers about $4 Trillion

With inflation running at over 6 percent and interest rates on savings near zero, the Federal Reserve is delivering a negative 6 percent real (inflation-adjusted) return on trillions of dollars in savings. This is effectively expropriating American savers’ nest eggs at the rate of 6 percent a year. It is not only a problem in 2021, however, but an ongoing monetary policy problem of long standing.

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