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Comment by dadjoker | Hacker News Reader

Why? Ever since the Fed was created - to supposedly avoid the problems that created the Great Depression - they have polluted the buying power of the dollar to where it is much less than it was pre-Fed.

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The success of Russia's central bank at managing the economy in the face of sanctions, war, and loss of trade should show you how good central banking is to a country.

Nobody is saying central banking is unwise. It’s that the fed is run by private individuals (who are very cozy with the banks) with no accountability who don’t really care about the American people outside of how much wealth they can extract from them.

A central bank with a goal to serve Americans would be a great institution.

You’re confusing the Fed with Congress. The Fed controls monetary policy (via the benchmark rate, a blunt tool), Congress fiscal policy (a surgical tool). Because Congress is effectively failed governance to deliver for the citizenry is in no way a reason to drag the Fed, who is arguably executing effective monetary policy. Unemployment is very low, and price stability has almost been reached. The Fed is doing all that it can while remaining within its dual mandate.

Who controls healthcare policy? Congress. Who controls food supplements? Congress. Who controls the minimum federal wage? Congress. Who controls taxes (both rates and incentives)? Congress. Entitlements? Congress. If you want better governance, vote for competent representatives, although I understand this is out of the hands of most and we’re being held back by the emotional and unsophisticated who vote against their own interests (broad strokes, lots of nuance and caveats).

The Fed could’ve even offered FedAccounts, free demand deposit accounts at the Fed to eliminate the unbanked and apply downward pressure to fees at commercial banks. But a certain party recently passed legislation to prevent that. Hard to avoid politics when they are driving suboptimal outcomes at scale.

Was it not the Fed that denied The Narrow Bank's business model to pass through demand deposit accounts directly to the Fed? And in their denial letter, they asserted both that TNB would be at too high of a risk of runs (which makes no sense since it'd have 100% reserves) because customers won't have enough other services like lending to make them sticky, but also that TNB would be too high of a risk of causing runs on other banks because it's too safe:

https://www.tnbusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TNB-Letter...

That’s also accurate. I too take issue with the Fed’s efforts to prevent TNB from operating.

The dirty little secret of the entire modern financial world is that the remit of banks is to get people to feel their money is safe, thereby convincing them to deposit it, and then use it to make loans way in excess of how much money they hold, thereby creating the ease of access to capital that the economy needs. And as long as people feel their money is safe, it is safe, because loaning money out is actually pretty reliable if you do it sensibly, the bank will be paid back eventually.

Unless everyone wants to take their deposits out at once and buy treasuries instead!

It's very reasonable to criticise commercial banking for delivering such poor value to depositors that narrow banking looks like a better option, but regardless, if that's the situation, your choice is between suppressing narrow banking and allowing the collapse of the entire system. You cannot reasonably expect an institution like the Reserve to make the other choice there.

The Federal Reserve system was created in 1913, the Great Depression kicked off in late 1929. Your comment seems like a non sequitur.

Where does this end? No central bank and all dollars are backed by bitcoin?

I personally think this is all very poorly thought out. There are weird superstitions around the Federal Reserve. Separate from that, "bankers" in general, and "international bankers" in particular have inherited all the medieval anti-Jewish prejudice. Then there's the modern finance system that occasionally dumps unsavory customers, like Alex Jones. This leads to a desire for a currency that exists outside of banks and bankers, where you can sell dietary supplements and scam people without having your account seized.

Unfortunately for those folks, Bitcoin is a weak vessel, and cannot, in reality, meet all the requirements. It takes tons of compute to create a Bitcoin, much less to process a transaction 'on the block chain'. It's not as anonymous as claimed, either, and should it be a currency, it's deflationary. Not all the implications of this are accounted for in the common knowledge about Bitcoin.

Are you thinking about the dollar leaving the gold standard?

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