Monday, April 30, 2012

The Ignorance about Austrian Economics at the NY Fed

A retired Senior Examiner at the Fed emails:

Thank you for carrying the light into the lion's den with your speech at the Fed.  I am a retired Senior Examiner of the Federal Reserve System (and hence not an economist), and can  confirm the incredible ignorance of Austrian thinking among the folks at the NY Fed (where I worked).  I'm not sure who is to blame--certainly the higher reaches of academia have played a role, but I have developed a level of cynicism about the character of the people that play the role of government (sort of) economists.  What I mean is that they have no interest in any economic ideas that don't lead to the growth of governmental power, a portion of which rubs off on them personally. 
I was an examiner, and hence had literally nothing to do with monetary policy.  Nevertheless, I have always been interested in economic ideas (I bought my first copy of Human Action when I was an undergraduate--not in economics--at Stanford University in the 1960s), so you can imagine that I'm not a youngster.  The good news is that the level of ignorance about things Austrian has dropped a lot since then. 
Keep up the good work

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