Sunday, November 23, 2014

The First Female Fed Inflationist is Dead


Nancy Teeters, who in 1978 became the first woman on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, , has died. She was 84, reports Bloomberg. She was a Fed governor from 1978 to 1984. First working under the Fed chairman G. William Miller and then under Paul Volcker.

The gal loved to print money.

Right from the start, after being sworn in on Sept. 18, 1978, in one of her first acts as Fed governor, she voted against a move by Miller to raise the discount rate 25 basis points to 8 percent. This despite the fact that Miller was no slouch when it came to money printing and that price inflation at the time, as measured by the CPI, was at 8.48% on a annualized basis.

Teeters objected the entire period when Volcker slowed the money printing in an attempt to battle near out-of-control inflation at that time. She called out the spike in interest rates that was necessary to kill the then price inflation. “You don’t need to go to 20 or 21 percent to restrain the monetary supply,” Teeters told NYT in January 1981.

In typical Paul Krugman fashion, after Volcker's battle to tame inflation, over the objections of Teeters, showed remarkable results, she took credit.

 In 1984, toward the end of her term, she told NYT that she had supported the thrust of the Fed’s anti-inflation campaign.

I am convinced there is a special part of hell reserved for central bankers, where the smell of ink permeates the air and gives the bankers located there eternal headaches of a cyclical fashion.

2 comments:

  1. Bob,
    Would be interested to get your take on the following article. Stockman makes an interesting case that inflation wont be the problem but deflation and a currency race to the bottom. http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/sell-sell-sell-the-central-bank-madmen-are-raging/

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  2. Good riddance. I hope her death was painful.

    ReplyDelete