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by marcosdumay 3289 days ago
It's useful to stop and ask yourself what exactly do central banks do that is so harmful.

The US situation of those bailouts and "too big to fail" is certainly problematic, but most people pushing that line are really against fractional reserves, but those don't really seem to have the effects people attribute to them. (And if they do have that effect, it's the central bank that sets their fraction, so it's entirely a matter of policy, not structure.)

1 comments

Most of the damage the Fed causes is due to artificial manipulation of interest rates, disrupting the time coordinating function they would serve when driven by natural market forces. This time discoordination is the source of the boom-bust cycle.
The Fed doesn't have the power of setting any useful interest rate, and even the one they do set they seem to follow the market instead of setting it. (What seems to repeat on every country, because the market has more money than the central bank, and the later must avoid bankruptcy.)

Central banks do have the power of controlling the amount of money in circulation on most countries, what does indirectly impact important interest rates. But the US is an exception here, as the Fed decided long ago to let fractional reserves run as low as the banks are deciding the fractions on practice, thus abiding from any control.