W. R. Collier Jr- OPINION- The annual meeting of the Federal Reserve in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will be overshadowed by a growing discontent with the Federal Reserve itself, and that discontent is fairly widespread. While critics from the left (the government managed market camp) focus mainly on their belief that the Federal Reserve favors and bails out the rich at the expense of the poor, the irony is that for those in the free market camp the Federal Reserve itself is a product of a leftward leaning progressive “economic management from the center” philosophy.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Sun, Ira Stoll opined, “Talking about the failed policies of the Obama Fed is a way for the GOP to respond to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the widening income gap.” Indeed, since 2009, after President Obama was sworn in, the Progressives have used the Fed to pursue a leftist economic policy and that, combines with massive regulations, has resulted in artificial market manipulations that have caused, so critics on the right say, this widening income and wealth gap.
So while the left intend to protest the Fed at Jackson Hole, and interestingly enough they were given access to a facility right on site that had previously been denied a free market group, the irony is it is their own agenda the Fed has been pursuing.
So American Principles In Action, a pro-prosperity, free market group, is going to be at Jackson Hole holding their own Jackson Hole Summit with some leading luminaries in the free market, pro-prosperity camp. The basic theme, as I read it, is that the Fed is acting like a “central planning committee”, and central planning tends only to benefit the planners. In this case, I would add, the benefit goes to the government, the leftist special interests who support their members of government, and, ironically, the bankers who run the Fed.
And so the passage through the House Financial Serices Committee of “The Centennial Monetary Commission” may be a major step toward unravelling, and quantifying, the failure of “central planning” through the Feds “discretionary monetary policy”, which tends to pick winners and losers on its own ideological basis, as opposed to letting the people choose winners and losers through their own market choices.
This commission, along with rising prices, stagnant wages, and the increasing wealth and income gap will be addressed at the Jackson Hole Summit, right across the street from where the Federal Reserve meets, and where leftist groups plan to protest the very animal their progressive ideology helped to produce in the first place.
While the left will be proposing to tax the rich, regulate more, raise wages artificially, and continue more of the same arrangements which have got us to this place, the Jackson Hole Summit will focus on free market solutions that bring equality and fairness back into the economic system. Prosperity, not reshuffling wealth from producers to the government and its benificiaries, will be the focus.
The Federal Reserve no doubt will cordially ignore all the events swirling around their meeting, but it will become increasingly difficult for the Fed to ignore the growing discontent and outright suspicion directed at it from the People.