by George Selgin
Despite the bright light streaming into my office window, reminding me of the beautiful spring weather here in Athens, I managed to spend most of yesterday afternoon listening to the first installment of Ben Bernanke’s 4-part lecture series on “The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis.” The lecture took place on Tuesday evening at George Washington University. The other parts will be given on the 22nd, 27th, and 29th of this month.
In this opening lecture Bernanke offers a brief overview of the role of central banks, their general origins, the specific origins of the Federal Reserve System, and the Fed’s early performance.
It would of course be silly to expect any sitting central banker, much less the head of the world’s most important central bank, to deliver an entirely candid lecture on the origins of central banking. But then again, Ben Bernanke is no run-of-the-mill central banker: he is a former academic economist and economic historian, and one with very high standing in the profession. So one might expect him to at least avoid gross distortions of the historical record to which his less academically-minded counterparts might be expected to resort. But no: as the lecture lumbered on (for Chairman Bernanke’s classroom demeanor is all too reminiscent of his demeanor when testifying to Congress), it became increasingly evident that the man lecturing at Duquès Hall was at least 99 and 44/100ths percent pure Federal Reserve spokesman.
So like any central banker, and unlike better academic economists, Bernanke consistently portrays inflation, business cycles, financial crises, and asset price “bubbles” as things that happen because…well, the point is that there is generally no “because.” These things just happen; central banks, on the other hand, exist to prevent them from happening, or to “mitigate” them once they happen, or perhaps (as in the case of “bubbles”) to simply tolerate them, because they can’t do any better than that. That central banks’ own policies might actually cause inflation, or contribute to the business cycle, or trigger crises, or blow-up asset bubbles–these are possibilities to which every economist worth his or her salt attaches some importance, if not overwhelming importance. But they are also possibilities that every true-blue central banker avoids like so many landmines. Are you old enough to remember that publicity shot of Arthur Burns holding a baseball bat and declaring that he was about to “knock inflation out of the economy”? That was Burns talking, not like a monetary economist, but like the Fed propagandist that he was. Bernanke talks the same way throughout much (though not quite all) of his lecture.
In describing the historical origins of central banking, for instance, Bernanke makes no mention at all of the fiscal purpose of all of the earliest central banks–that is, of the fact that they were set up, not to combat inflation or crises or cycles but to provide financial relief to their sponsoring governments in return for monopoly privileges. He is thus able to steer clear of the thorny challenge of explaining just how it was that institutions established for function X happened to prove ideally suited for functions Y and Z, even though the latter functions never even entered the minds of the institutions’ sponsors or designers!
