Why Fed Reform Could Be the Biggest Sleeper Issue of 2024

From The Daily Economy:

Joseph Sternberg, author of the “Political Economics” column at the Wall Street Journal, has been on the Federal Reserve’s case recently. He continues to take central bankers to task in his latest article. “The next president will inherit a Federal Reserve staffed by economists — and their intellectual helpmates in academia — who still don’t fully understand what has happened over the past few years, let alone over the past few decades,” Sternberg warns. He’s right. Fed officials admit to only limited and contingent culpability for high inflation in recent years.

The Fed is a flawed institution at best, and a failed institution at worst. Sternberg suggests several reforms. While potentially helpful, none go far enough.

First, Sternberg castigates the fashionable yet unfounded belief amongst policy economists that “Mr. Trump’s economic agenda of tariffs and tax cuts would be inflationary.” Sternberg is right to call out this nonsense.

Tariffs would make specific goods and services more expensive. This is a relative price effect. It only shows up in the general price level if it affects enough prices to drive up the index—and even then it doesn’t really qualify as inflation, because it’s a one-time transition to a higher price level. Inflation means a higher growth rate for the price level.

Tax cuts aren’t inflationary, either. If anything, by incentivizing additional savings and investment, tax cuts may result in a small productivity boost, and hence mild disinflation. The crude Keynesianism Sternberg calls out, despite its consistent record of failed predictions going back more than 70 years, is still alive and well amongst economists who see themselves as efficiency engineers first and social scientists second. We can safely ignore them.

Next, Sternberg laments Fed decision-makers’ “groupthink,” explained in part by the concentration of authority in the “Washington-based Board of Governors in thrall to the central bank’s research department.” The “Fed’s independence from the rest of the government” amplifies its irresponsibility. It “means politicians and voters can’t enforce accountability.” Sternberg correctly highlights the Fed’s adoption of flexible average inflation targeting (FAIT) in August 2020 as an example of deep institutional flaws. The Fed is picking its own goals and deciding whether or not it has achieved them. In other words, it’s a judge in its own cause. That’s unacceptable for anyone who cares about the rule of law.

How to fix this? Sternberg suggests changing how the Fed makes decisions, so that regional Fed branches have more input. He also wants Congress to keep a closer eye on monetary policymakers. These are probably good ideas. At the margin, they would help. But we can and should do more.

Here are a few harder-hitting ideas for Fed reform:

Get rid of the dual mandate. It’s redundant. The Fed’s monetary policy activities should solely focus on price stability.
Pare back the Fed’s regulatory powers radically. The Fed should ensure banks are adequately capitalized against short-term liabilities. That’s it.
End further credit allocation. Close the discount window.
Shrink the balance sheet. Return to a “Treasuries only” policy for open market operations.
Stop paying interest on reserves. Ditch the floor system and return to the corridor system.

For even more radical (and effective) reforms, consider the following, in ascending order of implausibility:

Compel the Fed to stabilize the dollar, or current-dollar GDP, or a related nominal anchor. If central bankers fail, they get fired.
Eliminate the FOMC. Automatically grow the monetary base by a set percentage each year. Long live Milton Friedman!
Freeze the monetary base. Outsource monetary policy to the market. From now on, financial intermediation (banking) is the sole means by which the money supply changes. The only requirement is banks must redeem their liabilities for fiat dollars, the stock of which is now fixed.
Revive commodity money. The gold standard is massively underrated. It’s not as attractive an option if the US is the only economy on gold. But it’s still worth a look.

“Fed reform could be the nerdiest sleeper issue of this campaign season,” Sternberg concludes.

I can only wish. Americans are hopping mad about dollar depreciation. But even with 9-percent consumer price inflation during 2022, Congress never seriously considered changing how the Fed works. Nevertheless, it should. I hope Sternberg is right about citizens’ appetite for reining in the central bank – the hungrier, and nerdier, the better.

From The Daily Economy:

The Fed is a flawed institution at best, and a failed institution at worst. Sternberg suggests several reforms. While potentially helpful, none go far enough.

Here are a few harder-hitting ideas for Fed reform:

Get rid of the dual mandate. It’s redundant. The Fed’s monetary policy activities should solely focus on price stability.
Pare back the Fed’s regulatory powers radically. The Fed should ensure banks are adequately capitalized against short-term liabilities. That’s it.
End further credit allocation. Close the discount window.
Shrink the balance sheet. Return to a “Treasuries only” policy for open market operations.
Stop paying interest on reserves. Ditch the floor system and return to the corridor system.

For even more radical (and effective) reforms, consider the following, in ascending order of implausibility:

Compel the Fed to stabilize the dollar, or current-dollar GDP, or a related nominal anchor. If central bankers fail, they get fired.
Eliminate the FOMC. Automatically grow the monetary base by a set percentage each year. Long live Milton Friedman!
Freeze the monetary base. Outsource monetary policy to the market. From now on, financial intermediation (banking) is the sole means by which the money supply changes. The only requirement is banks must redeem their liabilities for fiat dollars, the stock of which is now fixed.
Revive commodity money. The gold standard is massively underrated. It’s not as attractive an option if the US is the only economy on gold. But it’s still worth a look.

“Fed reform could be the nerdiest sleeper issue of this campaign season,” Sternberg concludes.

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.

The rate cut narrative is calcifying into gospel: the Fed must cut to save the consumer.

Bankrate reports that 59% of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without debt or selling something. And yet stocks are roaring, liquidity junkies are celebrating, and the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending.

Here’s the plot twist: before 2020, consumer confidence faithfully tracked equity markets. After 2020, that relationship broke. As one analyst put it, “The poor don’t hate stocks going up. They just don’t feel it anymore.”

So when the Fed cuts rates in one of the hottest stock markets in history, who exactly benefits? Not the 59%. Not the middle. Certainly not anyone renting and watching shelter inflation devour their paycheck.

Only the late-stage dot-com fever dreams did better in recent memory — back when analysts were valuing companies by the number of mammals breathing inside the office.

For the moment, stocks appear unsinkable, unslappable, and perhaps uninsurable. But this is what generational technology shifts do: they take a kernel of genuine innovation and inflate a decade of growth into a 36-month highlight reel. We’ve seen this movie. It premiered in 1999 and closed with adults crying into their PalmPilots.

And just as the internet continued reshaping the world long after Pets.com curled up and died, AI will keep marching on whether or not today’s multiples survive a stiff breeze. The technology is real. The valuations, however, will eventually need to stop hyperventilating and sit down with a glass of water.

Wheelbarrows are not chickens. A chicken is a biological production unit. A wheelbarrow is a capital good. A wheelbarrow doesn’t produce work. But it CAN be a productivity multiplier.

And that’s how we have to think of all those GPUs the hyperscalers are spending money on. If their thesis is right, trillion in AI and data center spending now, will translate into a massive burst in productivity and new technologies in the next two decades. That is the only justification for the current valuations/multiples at which these stocks trade now.

The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “So much depends, upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”

Today the wheelbarrow is Nvidia Green. And so much of the stock market depends on that wheelbarrow being a big enough productivity multiplier to offset $340 trillion in debt.