by Jeff Deist
Mises.org
Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to the Fed Board of Governors, may not have coined the excellent term “Fed Bug,” but she used it to delicious effect in this 2019 Financial Times interview:
“People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says.
Can anyone the ?New York Times attacks this dishonestly be all bad?
For our purposes, Fed Bugs are people with a faith-based belief in the power of central banks (and central bankers) to engineer economic growth using “monetary policy,”despite decades of history and current evidence to the contrary. They believe tinkering with inputs and rates and velocity and flows somehow makes us richer in terms of productivity, goods, and services. They believe in financial alchemy, as economist Nomi Prins puts it, rather than precious metals. They believe paper has value so long as government issues it and legislates its use. Most of all, they believe in technocratic control over money in the economy.