When a highly regarded investor like Stanley Druckenmiller describes the Federal Reserve as “stumbling” and “reckless,” you know the Fed has a serious credibility problem.
Cue Danielle DiMartino Booth. She spent the better part of a decade at the Dallas Fed working alongside Dick Fisher. Her brand new book “Fed Up” devotes a significant number of pages to practical Fed fixes.
“We’re no longer the same nation that we were in 1913 when the Federal Reserve act was initially conceived,” DiMartino Booth says. In other words, let’s bring the Fed into the realities of the 21st Century. Here are six of her policy proposals from the video above with Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough:
- Reduce the Fed’s mandate to just minimizing inflation
- Take the labor mandate out of the equation; put it back in the hands of the private sector
- Reduce regional Fed offices to ten districts (from twelve currently) by adding a regional Federal Reserve office (or two) on the West Coast and absorbing Minneapolis, St. Louis and Cleveland into Chicago
- Give every district a permanent vote to minimize the power of votes in New York and Washington D.C.
- The Fed should hire more staff with greater financial market familiarity and experience
- The Fed needs a better appreciation of monetary policy rules, like the Taylor Rule, which would help serve as a system of checks and balances
Watch the entire Real Conversations interview between DiMartino Booth and McCullough, “‘Fed Up’ Fed Veteran: Our Central Bank Is Failing, Here’s How to Fix It."