What I Told James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

James Bullard

During one of the breaks at the "Strategies For Monetary Policy: A Policy Conference"  held at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University last week, I had the chance to approach and talk to James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The conversation went roughly like this:

RW: Hi, I'm Bob Wenzel. I'm one of those guys that thinks you are going to crash the economy at some point again.

Bullard: Oh, you think we are keeping interest rates too high.

RW: No, I'm from the Austrian school, we focus on the money supply and don't think you should be monkeying with it at all.

Bullard: You forget, I am in St. Louis so I hear a lot from the monetarists all the time.

RW: No the monetarists mostly think in aggregates just like the Keynesians. Austrians focus more on sector flows. Wherever you pump the money that is where the boom is going to occur, for example, the stock market and real estate.

You can stop or slow down the money printing at any time but you generally don't until price inflation starts getting out of hand. Then you stop or slow down the printing and the crash occurs because the money flow stops it isn't there to prop up the stock market and real estate anymore.

And right now most of you are in a time lock thinking that price inflation won't seriously heat up again but it eventually will and that is when youwill slam on the money printing brakes and the crash will occur.

----
He listened attentively but the bell then rang for us to head into the auditorium for the next session.

But I consider Bullard fully warned.


Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.