Financial Repression and a Chronic Unemployment Problem

by Gordon T. Long
Gold Seek

What is little appreciated today is that the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978 assisted in “birthing” Financial Repression and placing us firmly on the Monetary policy path the Federal Reserve is presently imprisoned by.

Deep State planners fully understood then that employment would become an increasingly larger problem in America and within the developed nations as leveraged buyouts with immediate “downsizing”, “rightsizing” and “outsourcing” were beginning to dominate the financial engineering game of the day.

Driven by the political concerns in the late 1970s about rising unemployment, the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation in 1978 fundamentally compelled the U.S. central bank to drive interest rates progressively lower (see chart below).

Casual observers of the Fed speak of a “dual mandate” for U.S. monetary policy incorporating full employment and price stability, but careful reading of the Humphrey-Hawkins law shows that the former is paramount and must be satisfied by the Fed before price stability may be considered. Federal Reserve chairs have followed the single mandate of full employment to its logical conclusion, namely zero interest rates and the expropriation of private income.

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