This article is adapted from a lecture delivered to the Federalist Society: The Federal Reserve is a fundamental problem for the Constitutional order of the American Republic. How can it be that it considered itself able to unilaterally impose permanent inflation on the country, without legislative debate or approval?The shifting theories believed by central banks are among the most important of macro-economic factors. For example, William McChesney Martin, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board 1951-1970, rightly characterized inflation as “a thief in the night.” In remarkable contrast, the Fed under Ben Bernanke, chairman 2006-2014, explicitly committed itself and the country to inflation forever at the rate of 2% per year, thus assuming that constant inflation should not only be taken

Hold up your hand if you think that the aggregate losses of an organization are an asset of that organization. No hands at all? Absolutely right. Losses are not an asset. That’s accounting 101. Yet the greatest central bank in the world, the Federal Reserve, insists on claiming that its continuing losses, which have accumulated to the staggering sum of $164 billion, are an accounting asset.The Fed seeks to palm off this accounting entry as a “Deferred Asset.” Why does the Fed do this, which perhaps makes it look tricky instead of majestic? Because it does not want to report that it has lost all its $43 billion in capital and now has negative capital. The inevitable arithmetic is plain: start with the Fed’s $43 billion in capital, lose $164 billion, and the capital has inescapably become

In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor has given us a colorful and provocative review of the history, theory, and the profound effects of interest rates, the price that links the present and the future, which he argues is “the most important price of all.” The history runs from Hammurabi’s Code which in 1750 BC was “largely concerned with the regulation of interest,” and from the first debt cancellation, which was proclaimed by a ruler in ancient Mesopotamia, all the way to our world of pure fiat currencies, the recent Everything Bubble (now deflating) including cryptocurrencies (now crashing), and the effective cancellation of government debt by inflation and negative interest rates.The intellectual and political debates run from the Old Testament to Aristotle to John Locke and John Law,

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’.

Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), lost $3.6 billion in 2023,
 after a gigantic loss of $150 billion in 2022. But after booking these losses, and properly subtracting them from its capital, the SNB still had positive capital of over $70 billion.

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. 

[This article was first published in the New York Sun.]“Who will guard these guardians?” That poser of Juvenal, satirist of Rome, is an immortal question — nowhere more pertinent, though, than in deciding who should oversee the Federal Reserve.

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

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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,

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

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.

[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

The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, March 18, 20221. Many thanks to the Mises Institute and to sponsor Yousif Almoayyed for this opportunity to be with you all today as we consider one of the truly remarkable developments in the history of American central banking, money printing, and credit inflation.

The Federal Reserve now owns $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24 percent of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank.

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.

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.