Since September, Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve System has been cutting rates as if a financial crisis were looming. Just as in 2006, Powell raised the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent in the summer of 2023 and left it there until September of the following year. This past September, he cut rates by 50 percent in September and by 25 more basis points at the following Fed meeting just as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did starting in September 2007. We all know what happened next.That’s where the similarity ends, however, when it comes to overall monetary policy. When Bernanke started his cuts in September 2007, he did so the way the Fed had always done so: open market operations. The Fed began buying government securities from its member banks, thereby increasing the supply of dollars

Since September, Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve System has been cutting rates as if a financial crisis were looming. Just as in 2006, Powell raised the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent in the summer of 2023 and left it there until September of the following year. This past September, he cut rates by 50 percent in September and by 25 more basis points at the following Fed meeting just as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did starting in September 2007. We all know what happened next.That’s where the similarity ends, however, when it comes to overall monetary policy. When Bernanke started his cuts in September 2007, he did so the way the Fed had always done so: open market operations. The Fed began buying government securities from its member banks, thereby increasing the supply of dollars

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

During election years, incumbent presidents are routinely blamed for every societal ill during the previous four years. And almost nothing is riper for the picking than a significant rise in consumer prices. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), prices are currently increasing at a rate of 3 percent year over year and peaked at 8 percent during President Biden’s term in 2022.That is significantly higher “inflation,” as the BLS defines it, than American consumers have experienced in decades. But as economically harmful as many of President Biden’s policies may have been, no president can cause prices in general to rise. Neither can Congress or “greedy corporations.”Incidentally, “inflation” as an economic term originally meant the creation of new money and credit, not rising

During election years, incumbent presidents are routinely blamed for every societal ill during the previous four years. And almost nothing is riper for the picking than a significant rise in consumer prices. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), prices are currently increasing at a rate of 3 percent year over year and peaked at 8 percent during President Biden’s term in 2022.That is significantly higher “inflation,” as the BLS defines it, than American consumers have experienced in decades. But as economically harmful as many of President Biden’s policies may have been, no president can cause prices in general to rise. Neither can Congress or “greedy corporations.”Incidentally, “inflation” as an economic term originally meant the creation of new money and credit, not rising