Down with the Federal Reserve!

An interesting bit about the Federal Reserves and its effects on inflation and recession from "For A New Liberty" by Murry N. Rothbard:

"The Federal Reserve and Fractional Reserve Banking
Inflating by simply printing more money, however, is now considered
old- fashioned. For one thing, it is too visible; with a lot of high-denomination
bills floating around, the public might get the troublesome idea that
the cause of the unwelcome inflation is the government’s printing of all
the bills—and the government might be stripped of that power. Instead,
governments have come up with a much more complex and sophisticated,
and much less visible, means of doing the same thing: of organizing
increases in the money supply to give themselves more money to spend
and to subsidize favored political groups. The idea was this: instead of
stressing the printing of money, retain the paper dollars or marks or francs
as the basic money (the “legal tender”), and then pyramid on top of that a
mysterious and invisible, but no less potent, “checkbook money,” or bank
demand deposits. The result is an inflationary engine, controlled by
government, which no one but bankers, economists, and government
central bankers understands—and designedly so.
First, it must be realized that the entire commercial banking system, in
the United States or elsewhere, is under the total control of the central
government—a control that the banks welcome, for it permits them to
create money. The banks are under the complete control of the central
bank—a government institution—a control stemming largely from the
central bank’s compulsory monopoly over the printing of money. In the
United States, the Federal Reserve System performs this central banking
function. The Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) then permits the commercial
banks to pyramid bank demand deposits (“checkbook money”) on top of
their own “reserves” (deposits at the Fed) by a multiple of approximately
6:1. In other words, if bank reserves at the Fed increase by $1 billion, the
banks can and do pyramid their deposits by $6 billion—that is, the banks
create $6 billion worth of new money.
Why do bank demand deposits constitute the major part of the money
supply? Officially, they are not money or legal tender in the way that
Federal Reserve Notes are money. But they constitute a promise by a bank
that it will redeem its demand deposits in cash (Federal Reserve Notes)
anytime that the deposit holder (the owner of the “checking account”) may
desire. The point, of course, is that the banks don’t have the money; they
Inflation and the Business Cycle 183
cannot, since the y owe six times their reserves, which are their own
checking account at the Fed. The public, however, is induced to trust the
banks by the penumbra of soundness and sanctity laid about them by the
Federal Reserve System. For the Fed can and does bail out banks in
trouble. If the public understood the process and descended in a storm
upon the banks demanding their money, the Fed, in a pinch, if it wanted,
could always print enough money to tide the banks over.
The Fed, then, controls the rate of monetary inflation by adjusting the
multiple (6:1) of bank money creation, or, more importantly, by
determining the total amount of bank reserves. In other words, if the Fed
wishes to increase the total money supply by $6 billion, instead of actually
printing the $6 billion, it will contrive to increase bank reserves by $1
billion, and then leave it up to the banks to create $6 billion of new
checkbook money. The public, meanwhile, is kept ignorant of the process
or of its significance.
How do the banks create new deposits? Simply by lending them out in
the process of creation. Suppose, for example, that the banks receive the
$1 billion of new reserves; the banks will lend out $6 billion and create the
new deposits in the course of making these new loans. In short, whe n the
commercial banks lend money to an individual, a business firm, or the
government, they are not relending existing money that the public
laboriously had saved and deposited in their vaults—as the public usually
believes. They lend out new demand deposits that they create in the course
of the loan—and they are limited only by the “reserve requirements,” by
the required maximum multiple of deposit to reserves (e.g., 6:1). For, after
all, they are not printing paper dollars or digging up pieces of gold; they
are simply issuing deposit or “checkbook” claims upon themselves for
cash—claims which they wouldn’t have a prayer of honoring if the public
as a whole should ever rise up at once and demand such a settling of their
accounts.
How, then, does the Fed contrive to determine (almost always, to
increase) the total reserves of the commercial banks? It can and does lend
reserves to the banks, and it does so at an artificially cheap rate (the
“rediscount rate”). But still, the banks do not like to be heavily in debt to
the Fed, and so the total loans outstanding from the Fed to the banks is
never very high. By far the most important route for the Fed’s determining
of total reserves is little known or understood by the public: the method of
“open market purchases.” What this simply means is that the Federal
Reserve Bank goes out into the open market and buys an asset. Strictly, it
184 Libertarian Applications to Current Problems
doesn’t matter what kind of an asset the Fed buys. It could, for example,
be a pocket calculator for twenty dollars. Suppose that the Fed buys a
pocket calculator from XYZ Electronics for twenty dollars. The Fed
acquires a calculator; but the important point for our purposes is that XYZ
Electronics acquires a check for twenty dollars from the Federal Reserve
Bank. Now, the Fed is not open to checking accounts from private
citizens, only from banks and the federal government itself. XYZ
Electronics, therefore, can only do one thing with its twenty-dollar check:
deposit it at its own bank, say the Acme Bank. At this point, another
transaction takes place: XYZ gets an increase of twenty dollars in its
checking account, in its “demand deposits.” In return, Acme Bank gets a
check, made over to itself, from the Federal Reserve Bank.
Now, the first thing that has happened is that XYZ’s money stock has
gone up by twenty dollars—its newly increased account at the Acme
Bank—and nobody else’s money stock has changed at all. So, at the end
of this initial phase—phase I—the money supply has increased by twenty
dollars, the same amount as the Fed’s purchase of an asset. If one asks,
where did the Fed get the twenty dollars to buy the calculator, then the
answer is: it created the twenty dollars out of thin air by simply writing
out a check upon itself. No one, neither the Fed nor anyone else, had the
twenty dollars before it was created in the process of the Fed’s
expenditure.
But this is not all. For now the Acme Bank, to its delight, finds it has a
check on the Federal Reserve. It rushes to the Fed, deposits it, and
acquires an increase of $20 in its reserves, that is, in its “demand deposits
with the Fed.” Now that the banking system has an increase in $20, it can
and does expand credit, that is, create more demand deposits in the form
of loans to business (or to consumers or government), until the total
increase in checkbook money is $120. At the end of phase II, then, we
have an increase of $20 in bank reserves generated by Fed purchase of a
calculator for that amount, an increase in $120 in bank demand deposits,
and an increase of $100 in bank loans to business or others. The total
money supply has increased by $120, of which $100 was created by the
banks in the course of lending out checkbook money to business, and $20
was created by the Fed in the course of buying the calculator.
In practice, of course, the Fed does not spend much of its time buying
haphazard assets. Its purchases of assets are so huge in order to inflate the
economy that it must settle on a regular, highly liquid asset. In practice,
this means purchases of U.S. government bonds and other U.S.
Inflation and the Business Cycle 185
government securities. The U.S. government bond market is huge and
highly liquid, and the Fed does not have to get into the political conflicts
that would be involved in figuring out which private stocks or bonds to
purchase. For the government, this process also has the happy
consequence of helping to prop up the government security market, and
keep up the price of government bonds.
Suppose, however, that some bank, perhaps under the pressure of its
depositors, might have to cash in some of its checking account reserves in
order to acquire hard currency. What would happen to the Fed then, since
its checks had created new bank reserves out of thin air? Wouldn’t it be
forced to go bankrupt or the equivalent? No, because the Fed has a
monopoly on the printing of cash, and it could—and would—simply
redeem its demand deposit by printing whatever Federal Reserve Notes
are needed. In short, if a bank came to the Fed and demanded $20 in cash
for its reserve—or, indeed, if it demanded $20 million—all the Fed would
have to do is print that amount and pay it out. As we can see, being able to
print its own money places the Fed in a uniquely enviable position.
So here we have, at long last, the key to the mystery of the modern
inflationary process. It is a process of continually expanding the money
supply through continuing Fed purchases of government securities on the
open market. Let the Fed wish to increase the money supply by $6 billion,
and it will purchase government securities on the open market to a total of
$1 billion (if the money multiplier of demand deposits/reserves is 6:1) and
the goal will be speedily accomplished. In fact, week after week, even as
these lines are being read, the Fed goes into the open market in New York
and purchases whatever amount of government bonds it has decided upon,
and thereby helps decide upon the amount of monetary inflation.
The monetary history of this century has been one of repeated loosening
of restraints on the State’s propensity to inflate, the removal of one
check after another until now the government is able to inflate the money
supply, and therefore prices, at will. In 1913, the Federal Reserve System
was created to enable this sophisticated pyramiding process to take place.
The new system permitted a large expansion of the money supply, and of
inflation to pay for war expenditures in World War I. In 1933, another
fateful step was taken: the United States government took the country off
the gold standard, that is, dollars, while still legally defined in terms of a
weight of gold, were no longer redeemable in gold. In short, before 1933,
there was an important shackle upon the Fed’s ability to inflate and
186 Libertarian Applications to Current Problems
expand the money supply: Federal Reserve Notes themselves were
payable in the equivalent weight of gold.
There is, of course, a crucial difference between gold and Federal
Reserve Notes. The government cannot create new gold at will. Gold has
to be dug, in a costly process, out of the ground. But Federal Reserve
Notes can be issued at will, at virtually zero cost in resources. In 1933, the
United States government removed the gold restraint on its inflationary
potential by shifting to fiat money: to making the paper dollar itself the
standard of money, with government the monopoly supplier of dollars. It
was going off the gold standard that paved the way for the mighty U.S.
money and price inflation during and after World War II.
But there was still one fly in the inflationary ointment, one restraint left
on the U.S. government’s propensity for inflation. While the United States
had gone off gold domestically, it was still pledged to redeem any paper
dollars (and ultimately bank dollars) held by foreign governments in gold
should they desire to do so. We were, in short, still on a restricted and
aborted form of gold standard internationally. Hence, as the United States
inflated the money supply and prices in the 1950s and 1960s, the dollars
and dollar claims (in paper and checkbook money) piled up in the hands of
European governments. After a great deal of economic finagling and
political arm-twisting to induce foreign governments not to exercise their
right to redeem dollars in gold, the United States, in August 1971,
declared national bankruptcy by repudiating its solemn contractual
obligations and “closing the gold window.” It is no coincidence that this
tossing off of the last vestige of gold restraint upon the governments of the
world was followed by the double-digit inflation of 1973–1974, and by
similar inflation in the rest of the world.
We have now explained the chronic and worsening inflation in the
contemporary world and in the United States: the unfortunate product of a
continuing shift in this century from gold to government-issued paper as
the standard money, and of the development of central banking and the
pyramiding of checkbook money on top of inflated paper cur rency. Both
interrelated developments amount to one thing: the seizure of control over
the money supply by government.
If we have explained the problem of inflation, we have not yet examined
the problem of the business cycle, of recessions, and of inflationary
recession or stagflation. Why the business cycle, and why the new mysterious
phenomenon of stagflation?"