The Fed Turns 100: A Survey of the Critics

Mises Daily: Thursday, December 05, 2013 by Gregory Bresiger

End America’s central bank because it caused the crashes of 2008, 1987, and 1929 and will blunder again. That’s what many critics are saying about the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), which turns 100 on December 23. They note that on the Fed’s watch America has endured numerous bubbles, crashes, and inflationary cycles that have greatly devalued the dollar. The Fed, they say, has caused or aggravated several crashes.

“The Fed’s performance over the century has been abysmal, no matter how you look at it,” says Professor Joseph Salerno, a business professor and monetary expert at Pace University. “If you say the goal of the Fed was to prevent calamities, then you have to say that it has been a failure,” says William A. Fleckenstein, a hedge fund manager and the author of Greenspan’s Bubbles……To Read More…..