Investors interested in the stock market and financial news follow the Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed, as closely as Fox Mulder followed the cigarette-smoking man, but if you don’t care about stocks and bonds, you may wonder whether you should care about a big, boring bank.
You most definitely should care. The Fed is among the most important institutions in our country, yet news coverage about its operations and decisions is scarce and misleading. Nevertheless, the truth is out there, and just as the cigarette-smoking man seemed like a bore, what he was up to was not.
My reference to the cigarette-smoking man is apt because the Fed has a conspiratorial origin. Even the title of left-wing William Greider’s book, Secrets of the Temple, suggests a conspiracy, as does right-wing Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Other books about the Fed’s history are New Left historian Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, which has a chapter on the history of the Fed, and libertarian economist Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money and Mystery of Banking.
