Brendan Greeley

So they gave the Bank of England the job of...

producing bank notes, right?

Because banks wouldn't always produce them in the units and in the volumes that you need for commerce.

Then it gets the job of providing liquidity in a crisis on its own balance sheet.

These are things that central banks had to figure out to do in response to crises.

And then the government says, yes, please, that's your job.

We'll put that in your job description, the mandate.

you know, we can change the mandate.

We have to understand the distinction between what we as a democracy can instruct the Federal Reserve to do and the Federal Reserve's independence to make those decisions on its own.

So what you don't want is the Treasury Department reaching into the Fed and say, lower interest rates tomorrow or buy all this kind of debt tomorrow.

But you do want the flexibility for the Fed to be responsible to Congress, responsible to a democracy.

And we should have the ability to say,

You know, you have a new job, and that job is important.

You know, when we look at the Fed's actual mandate, it's to help the monetary and credit aggregates grow.

You know, monetary aggregates are just deposits.

Credit aggregates are different kinds of loans in a way to increase the productivity of the economy.

That's in the Fed's mandate.

Fed doesn't think about what productive loans are, what unproductive loans are.

It doesn't really have meaningful credit or monetary aggregates anymore.

It just doesn't think about that stuff.