In a November commentary, I warned that Ben Bernanke’s expansionary monetary policy threatened to erode the value of the dollar and weaken the American economy. Now the leading mind of the House GOP caucus is saying the same thing to the Fed Chairman’s face. With Bernanke appearing before the House Budget Committee earlier today, newly minted Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin laid the consequences of “quantitative easing” on the line:
“There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency,” Ryan told Bernanke. “Chairman Bernanke: We know you know this. We know that you’re focused and concerned about this. The Fed’s exit strategy and future policy – it will determine how this ends.”
Ryan said he believed a “course correction here in Washington is sorely needed.”
“Endless borrowing is not a strategy,” he said. “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy – the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion – will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”
“It is hard to overstate the consequences of getting this wrong. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency and this has given us tremendous benefits in the global economy,” Ryan said.
As usual, Paul Ryan is right. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done from the outside. The Fed operates free of traditional rules of transparency (one of the reasons the push to audit its books has gained so much traction) and it works on the basis of a delusional proposition that it can be an engine of economic stimulus at the same time that it maintains the dollar as a stable store of value (a proposition that Ryan has rightly called into question). There’s still a lot of work to be done to rationalize American monetary policy. But it’s at least heartening to know that we’ve literally got our best man on it.
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