At the state level my background is in economics I’ve spent several years um doing fiscal policy analysis before uh rising up to my current position and I also had the privilege of authoring a textbook called economics in action that’s been used in econ courses here at the thales academy uh so today
Uh the uh tantalizing uh title of the uh of the discussion the creature from Jekyll Island um the workings of the Federal Reserve so uh we’ll we’ll find out in a few minutes a little bit of the story behind that title about Jekyll Island um
Uh but but really just wanted to kind of discuss today uh this morning the Federal Reserve kind of how it works and especially in today’s climate of rising prices um to tie in the workings of the Federal Reserve their role in inflation uh as well as just kind of a an overview of
How that works and just the federal reserve’s outsized role in the economy in general um so this gentleman here some of you may have seen him on the news uh his name is Jerome Pyle he is the chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve and
I wanted to I saw him showing his picture up there just because I wanted to start off with just a short little story uh or anecdote um and some of you may recall if you follow this things closely but on August 26th uh that gentleman Mr Powell uh he made a
Speech just making a speech declaring the federal reserve’s strong commitment to fighting inflation obviously I’m sure you all are painfully aware of what’s going on in terms of the rising cost of living and prices all along the board uh and so during the speech Powell affirmed that the Federal Reserve will quote use
Our tools forcefully to attack inflation and he expects the central banks uh to continue raising interest rates in a way that he said quote will cause some pain to the U.S economy so why do I bring this up because uh just that day alone after those comments that chairman Paul made
The Dow Jones on the stock market dropped three percent that day doesn’t necessarily sound like a thought but to put that in perspective that’s one day three percent in one day what does that mean that’s just over one trillion dollars in value and so so recall this is Dow Jones so
This is people’s 401ks their Investments retirement Investments and so forth so just in one day from one man that man just giving a speech one trillion dollars of value in assets of people’s retirement funds and savings was wiped out I would say that’s quite a bit of power
Uh you know we can have discussions about who wields the most power of the economy you know Bill Gates Jeff Bezos uh you know the president Congress Etc uh I would say that man Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve arguably wield the most power and influence over our shaping our economy so um
The Federal Reserve Let’s uh just do kind of a quick overview you know what is it a little bit of a couple minutes on their history the founding um so the Federal Reserve is considered the nation’s uh Central Bank uh and important to note that Congress maintains oversight over the Federal
Reserve and running it is a seven board or seven-member Board of Governors uh chaired of course by Mr Paul as I mentioned uh and the governing body that’s located in Washington DC and these Governors uh Board of Governors are nominated by the president uh um and confirmed by their positions by
The U.S Senate so it’s a lot of political control and oversight over who’s running uh the board and in turn running the Federal Reserve board is appointed by Congress says so there’s 12 District Banks and they serve as the as the bankers bank for the banks in their District
Um and and by that I mean the main functions as the bankers Bank the 12 District Banks um they basically provide the same kind of services that your bank provides to you except they’re providing those services to to your Banks uh in their District services like checking uh holding accounts checking accounts for
The banks uh on the Federal Federal Reserve books they make loans to the banks they they engage in check clearing Services also they engage in a lot of regular regulatory monitoring of the bank so that’s a an important role the Federal Reserve as well how about that last one is really the
Last bullet point there monetary policy that’s really what we’re going to uh focus on on The Talk today and I mentioned there the Federal Open Market Committee uh that’s the body that conducts monetary policy so we’ll be focusing on that fomc focusing on that a bit
Quite a bit today so a little bit of History pre-federal Reserve so that the current central bank known as the Federal Reserve was not the first attempt at a Central Bank in the U.S the first one took place in 1791 and that was um founded upon the urging of Alexander
Hamilton who was the treasurer at the time of course and Hamilton had some ambitious ideas about how to solve some of the financial and economic uh challenges facing that at the time very very young nation of ours and and he thought he felt that a central bank would be pretty critical and pretty
Helpful at that time and at that time the First Bank First Central Bank acted as primarily just as a Fiscal Agent for the federal government providing Bank also provided banking services to the public but importantly it did not engage in monetary policy uh it was the first bank was had a
20-year Charter uh and after that 20-year Charter uh expired um Congress decided not to renew it so that was that was the uh the lifespan of the First Central Bank was just that first 20 years uh so then they went back to the drawing board and uh the Second Bank of the
United States was signed into law by James Madison in 1816. this was inspired in in no small part because of a lot of the debts that the U.S government took on because of the the War of 1812 uh and so supporters of the the notion of creating another Central Bank um
Felt that it would be that would be really helpful in helping to pay off pay off the debts from that war from the war of 1812. but however Congress voted to shutter uh it was uh you know obviously controversial not everyone agreed that it was the best solution or an effective
Solution so uh two years prior to the 20-year Charter expiring in 1834 uh Congress voted to shutter that National Bank which then brings us to the creation of the Federal Reserve which was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act signed by then President Woodrow Wilson but importantly the Genesis of the idea
Can be traced to a secret meeting in 1910. this is where Jekyll Island comes into play and the uh the title of this talk uh and and that creature from Jekyll Island that’s also the the name of a book a pretty well-known book um what Winston was actually telling me
That you can’t even find it on Amazon but a book by that name the creature from Jekyll Island uh a book documenting this process of the creation of the Federal Reserve and kind of how this came together so so what are we talking about so on
November 10 1910 six men met on Jekyll Island to draw plans to create a new Central Bank um and this process was heavily heavily shaped and informed and influenced by big banking influences the meeting was arranged by JP Morgan yes that JP Morgan of the Investment Bank uh notoriety and
The attendees included Henry Davidson who was a partner at JP Morgan uh Frank vanderlip who was a partner at a Rockefeller owned National City Bank Paul Warburg who was a partner in a large Investment Bank also Nelson Aldrich who’s a senator and member of the Senate finance committee along with
His assistant and a Piat Andrew who was then assistant treasury secretary so you can see a lot of influence by big Bankers JP Morgan Nelson Rockefeller had their fingerprints all over this meeting uh and interestingly enough uh this as I mentioned this was a secret meeting it
Word of it didn’t really get out until the 1930s uh when some of the attendees started uh discussing it that uh one of them I believe wrote in his Memoirs and talked about this meeting which really kind of opened the uh the floodgates on people learning more about that meeting
So Jekyll Island is in an island off of uh Georgia just by the way so what were some of the uh at least stated concerns of these uh folks that that brought them together to discuss creating a new Central Bank concern over Financial panics there have been some
Some panics over the previous several years and what happened in the kind of decentralized banking system at that time during banking payments panics uh Bank you know money was spread out in the banks Bank vaults across the country there was there was no real Central over centralized oversight or depository at
That time someone panicked you know people started panicking and and withdrawing their money from Banks and and causing all sorts of failures among Banks because of that money was kind of Frozen it couldn’t really move around uh to where it was needed most there was no Central Bank that was authorized to
Create generate new money and I’ll talk shortly about how the Federal Reserve now does that creating new money um so those are some of the stated um some of those stated reasons and and um uh incentives for them to come but but one thing and this was a quote from one
Of the books uh uh from the gentleman from there talking about and this is really to the heart of what I think was behind their motivation is they talked about the inelastic supply of currency and limited supplies of gold also contributed to long and painful deflation so they were concerned that
That first phrase there I think is really key inelastic supply of currency so does that mean that means as I mentioned a minute ago there was no means to create new money to inject new money into the system and they found that troubling and I’ll explain why not necessarily and it
Wasn’t necessarily A altruistic motives they had in mind so um so what were some of the first steps that happened after that uh after the Federal Reserve was created um well they centralized banking Reserves at the fed I’m talking about those Regional Banks uh that I mentioned
A minute ago they made it much easier and this much easier to create new money I’ll get to that in a minute uh that has to do with the monetary policy that they developed uh they cut in half the reserve requirements of banks allowing for more rapid inflation I’ll talk about reserve requirements
Um in a couple minutes kind of explain that in more detail and why reducing reserve requirements would would help facilitate uh inflation more money circulating in the economy so with the creation of the Federal Reserve uh we have to kind of pause for a minute and ask ourselves you know who
Benefits you know so how do banks make money well to the large extent they make money through loans they lend money out to people wanting to borrow money to uh Finance their car purchase take out a mortgage businesses wanting to finance their business expansion Etc so the reserve requirement so what does
That mean basically uh so when you make a deposit at your bank save a thousand dollars the bank doesn’t hold all of that thousand dollars you know in their vaults in their reserves there’s a reserve requirement and typically and and currently and traditionally Reserve requirement has been 10 so what that
Means is the bank only needs to hold 10 percent of all the deposits actually have them available for people to withdraw the rest of it the rest of that 90 percent they try to use as much as that to lend out to people because that’s how they make money they lend out
Money they charge interest on the loans that’s how they make money so basically for example and we can see how this this process can spread out throughout the economy throughout the banking system and really generate a lot of new money circulating around so say for example you deposit a
Thousand dollars at your bank right so they don’t they don’t hold all thousand dollars at that bank they’ll hold a hundred dollars of that to meet that ten percent Reserve requirement the other nine hundred dollars they’ll lend out so say for example um they lend it out to uh that 900 to uh
You know Mr Smith uh to to buy a used car uh so now Mr Smith has this 900 he uses the uh uses to buy a used car now that used car dealer has 900 that they put in their bank account so now their bank has nine
Hundred dollars they only need to keep ten percent they only need to keep nine uh ninety dollars in their vault so now that bank can lend out the other eight hundred and ten dollars so now uh someone else receives that uh eight hundred ten dollars as a loan uh that
810 gets deposited in that bank that bank only needs to take keep the ten percent the eighty one dollars they can lend out the rest so you can kind of see as this Cycles through the economy that initial deposit of a thousand dollars if there’s a 10 reserve requirement has the
Potential to turn into ten thousand dollars circulating through the economy with all this uh money being lent out to make all these purchases um and so I think you could see like if so when the uh Federal Reserve was created and they reduced those reserve requirements so say for example you can
See if the reserve requirement was lowered from 10 to 5 that means even more money during this process this money multiplier process can be created uh so with that you know more money supply means more loans which means more interest payments for the banks which means greater Bank profits so who’s benefiting
And recall what I was saying a minute ago at Jekyll Island the big Bankers were concerned with inelastic money supply so they wanted more uh to be easier for the central bank for the Federal Reserve to create more money and initiate this process um so I think it’s easy to to make the
Argument that the big Bankers really had their bottom line uh in mind when they were creating the Federal Bank they wanted to to fight against the inner inelastic money supply and you could see uh with the especially with this money multiplier impact how an increase in the
Money supply really AIDS the big bank’s uh bottom line so um so how does this how does this process work I’ll try to cover that uh in terms of the Federal Reserve creating more money uh and impacting the money supply so you know you’ll see um and we’ve seen this several times now
Over the last uh you know this year headlines about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates uh to fight inflation so what does that mean when the FED takes action to raise or lower for that matter interest rates so this has to do with the money uh monetary policy tools that
We were talking about I was talking about a minute ago um so I already went over the reserve requirement um but the federal funds rate that’s going to come into play this is really what’s being targeted by the Federal Reserve so the Federal Reserve doesn’t actually directly change the rates that
You know they don’t go in and just you know punch numbers in on a computer do do and and uh you know interest rates now are higher and lower automatically they engage in activity that we’re all alter rates so if you pay close attention to those headlines about the
Federal Reserve trying to change rates they’ll talk about Federal Reserve is targeting a lower or higher interest rate so so how do they do they do it largely through open market operations so so getting back to the um uh getting back to the reserve requirements right so oftentimes Banks
When they settle up at the end of the day they’ll see oh gosh we don’t have enough money on hand to to fulfill our reserve requirements and then other banks will have have more than enough so what will happen at the end of the day some banks the banks that are short
They’ll borrow money from the banks that have extra very short-term loans oftentimes even just overnight sometimes you’ll hear reports about overnight loans but that is that’s the federal funds rate right the federal funds rate is the rate that these Banks charge each other the interest that they charge each
Other on these very short term often overnight loans um in in order to uh so the banks that so the banks can fulfill their reserve requirements so so how does how does the Federal Reserve then what what activities do they engage in to impact the interest
Rates so to raise rates the FED will sell assets so what does that mean so the Federal Reserve has has a lot of assets on it on his books they’ll have they’ll have money they’ll have cash on hand they’ll also own a lot of uh especially government treasuries
Government bonds right so to raise the rates if they want to impact interest rates and try to raise them what the feds will do is they’ll sell uh some other acids some of their bonds to these Banks so what happens then is that uh the the uh the banks
Uh will buy these purchase these assets and so therefore the banks now they’re so the banks are exchanging their cash for government securities in large part treasuries bonds so now the banks have less cash on hand to lend out so simple supply and demand tells you that
Um a a diminished Supply so they’ll have fewer loanable funds now they’ll have less cash on hand to lend out so then that’s going to lead to higher interest rates there’s going to be fewer loanable funds out there in the system so banks are going to tend to charge higher
Interest rates because of the diminished supply of available funds conversely to lower rates the FED Federal Reserve will buy assets off the bank so what they’ll do is they’ll go to the banks and say hey we’ll we’ll buy you know a million dollars worth of uh your treasury bonds that you own of
Those assets and so the Federal Reserve but here’s here’s the kicker uh when the Federal Reserve buys those assets they’re not buying it they’re not using money on their on their books on their ledger to buy those assets they’re creating money out of thin air to buy those assets um
And that’s that’s how money creation happens uh so you know for example if if you buy something you know you if you spend five hundred dollars to buy a TV for example you know you’re taking 500 from your account and giving that 500 to the store Federal Reserve doesn’t do that the
Federal Reserve when they buy their assets from the banks they don’t take you know a million dollars from their account they just credit the the banks with the million dollars they just generate the zeros out of thin air um and then the banks have now have that
And that counts as cash and so now the banks have uh you know in this case for example a million dollars now to lend out and that money multiplier process starts starts up with that million dollars that can turn into 10 million dollars circulating in the economy um so that’s really critical to
Understand and I mean not just trying to a a brief overview of the time I’m uh allowed to try to give an understanding just kind of how this process works you know in the old days the Federal Reserve used to have actually you know would print up new dollar bills you know on
The printing presses and send it to the banks uh but now it’s just done all digitally so so at any rate so when the FED does that and they’re they’re buying the assets um from the bank so now the banks have more cash on hand so
Uh the banks then are going to tend to lower interest rates uh to because they have more money to lend so they need to entice more borrowers so you’re going to attract more borrowers with lower interest rates so just kind of a quick overview of of the primary the main tool
The Federal Reserve uses to uh impact interest rates and yeah like I said it does so buying a money created out of thin air and then another thing that the Federal Reserve engages in that impacts the the money supply um is What’s called monetizing the debt
And what that means is uh when the government when they engage in deficit spending uh meaning you know when the government is trying to spend more money than they have uh you know they issue these debt uh instruments uh so most of them are typically sold to the public or
Or investment uh you know firms making interest but when there’s not enough interest or when deficits are particularly High the Federal Reserve will print up well digitally print up more money uh to buy some of those debt instruments but some of those treasuries from the government
Uh using new money so that is another thing or another action that can manipulate and increase the money supply that the Federal Reserve engages in so we kind of have this this two-headed coin here so efforts to lower interest rates that I talked about a minute ago and then this monetizing the debt
Process those will serve to increase the money supply and then okay so yeah that’s just a reminder the federal funds rate is the interest rate commercial Banks charge each other for those short-term loans key idea so um okay the slide made it in uh so so here
Is the Federal fund’s target rate this is this means this is the Federal Reserve targeting that federal funds rate you know that the banks um uh uh the banks charge each other on those short-term overnight loans so you could see this is starting back in uh
January 1st of 2009. you can see they’re basically targeting and this is of course some perspective coming out of the Great Recession and this was the primary tool in their toolkit the Federal Reserve was using to try to um bring the economy back up out from the Great Recession was
Extremely low interest rates lots of money creation try to get money flowing through the economy and get businesses and and consumers borrowing money again to get things um stimulated so you can see in 2009 all the way up through 2016 I mean those were historically low targeted interest rates
Um and then you can see in 2016 it starts climbing up and kind of on a uh you know a staircase pattern there for the next couple years um they start trying to gradually raise interest rates because they recognize all that money circulating the economy is going to be causing price inflation
So right there around 2019 going into 2020 and then you see the big drop off in 2020 that was in response to the covid economic lockdowns so you know they go back to their their default strategy of of uh ultra low interest rates and printing up more money and
Creating more money to try to combat the negative impacts of the covet economic impacts of the kova lockdowns so then you can see it was uh uh pretty low there they held them low for a couple of years and then at the end of the chart there in the last basically last year
There’s been several um uh rate hikes again Federal Reserve trying to bring those rates back up again to Tamp down inflation um and just uh just a note here uh on inflation so you know uh inflation is a monetary phenomenon I know it’s been in the news
A lot obviously over the last year there’s a lot of attempted explanations for why prices are rising um but as a Milton Friedman once famously said you know inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon it’s really just more money circulating in the economy uh chasing goods and services so when you have
Uh you know again supply and demand when you have a rising a sharply Rising number of dollars chasing goods and services um there’s there’s more dollars that are that are going to be used to purchase each one of those goods and services so that’s when we see prices rising across the board
Uh let’s see okay so now just to put this into a little bit of context so the money supply this is the chart of the money supply and this is um real quick you’ll notice it’s it’s the M1 there’s different measures of the money supply but this is the most basic
One M1 uh and this measures uh the most liquid forms of money in the economy such as actual cash circulating checkable or demand uh deposits uh and and they still list Travelers checks I don’t know if anyone even remembers those anymore but the fed’s Still Still
Lists those as part of the M1 money supply um I doubt that’s a very large percentage of it um what’s basically the money that’s most readily available to spend you know when when folks are spending money there’s broader measures that include other um other um uh savings and time deposits and CD
Certificates of deposits money market funds things like that but I focused on M1 here because again it’s the most liquid it’s the most readily available form of money to for folks to spend so so I showed you in the last chart you know the Federal Reserve uh starting in
2009 trying to keep interest rates really low so this is the result with the money supply you can see so a steady increase so starting um in January 2008 the money supply total money supply was about just under 1.4 trillion dollars 12 years later after this steady supply
Of historically you know the result of of the FED trying to keep maintain historically low interest rates by 2020 January 2020 money supply had climbed to just about four trillion dollars so the money supply nearly tripled in 14 years but then you’ll see in 2020 it just goes berserk
Uh for lack of better term um from January 2020 and over the next two years to January 2022 it went from uh basically about 4 trillion to 20 and a half trillion dollars it more than quintupled in two years so if you want to see if you want
To know why your grocery bill has exploded in the last year you want to know why gas you know blew up to four dollars a gallon lately and is dipped and is now heading back up again housing prices have haven’t plated so much rents are going up that’s why this is completely unprecedented
We’re talking now keep in mind again just in 2008 the total entire money supply was less than one and a half trillion it increased in two years these last two years by 17 trillion that’s just the increase in the last two years this is money circulating through the economy um
And so a lot of that of course not all of it was just the fed’s attempt to keep interest rates low um the federal federal government engaged in ambitious spending you know coveted relief funds and and stimulus uh spending Etc significant federal government deficits nearly six trillion dollars in in deficit spending Alone
Um in in in 2020 and 2021 so much of that much of that debt or I’m sorry much of that deficit spending was monetized as we mentioned earlier monetized by the Federal Reserve with just new money creation so you so you can imagine you know close to Six trillion dollars
Um in monetizing the debt again think about that money multiplier once that hits the economy and that starts circulating through the economy how much that can grow into so if you want to understand again like I said if you want to stand why prices are rising across the board just have a look
At that chart and so now I wanted to to mention a couple things kind of in closing and then they’ll be happy to answer any questions that you all have so the the Federal Reserve it’s awful it’s often talked about the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate those two items are maximizing sustainable
Employment and price stability uh so this chart here this goes back this starts at 1913 the creation of the Federal Reserve and this charts the um Consumer Price Index uh over time up to current day and you can see that basically this is measuring the value of the dollar and
How the value of a dollar has diminished in the hundred plus years since the Federal Reserve and essentially uh what do I have here the dollar has lost nearly 97 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 97 percent so the buying power of a dollar in 1913
Is equivalent to just under three and a half cents today so price stability I I think that would be um I would I would argue the Federal Reserve is is failing drastically in that part of their mandate um price stability you can see and also
I think it’s important like I say on the slide here this harms Savers so if you’re trying to save money why are you going to save money when you know you can see from this chart and you know that money is going to be less worth less
When when you go to go to spend it so it’s really harmful for Savers and for a healthy economy and even for a healthy you know household budgeting you know savings is important it’s critical you want to but when you look at this chart and you understand oh
Look at this chart and understand I mean this really goes against savings because your savings is going to diminish in value over time so it really harms Savers it really uh sends uh negative incentives for people throughout the economy to to disincentivize savings and then one more point I wanted to make
These inflationary policies they increase wealth inequality uh and and here’s why so we have the easy money low interest environments they inflate the stock market and real estate bubbles in particular um I’m sure if you’ve been paying attention um you know going back from uh really going back from the uh you know
Recovering from the Great Recession I showed you the low interest rates all the money creation stock market has inflated um and then in the last couple years outside of um the cover shutdowns stock market in in it’s now being burst but it was I had a really inflated a stock market bubble
Real estate bubble as well so for example the Dow Jones from 2009 to 20 2020 pre-covered roughly tripled uh in just those 11 years housing prices after biting bottoming out at the end of 2010 have more than doubled they’re up 130 percent up to date and as I mentioned that bubble really
Inflating is up 38 in the last two years alone housing prices um those are those are starting to cool off uh because of the Federal Reserve you know working to bring the interest rates up again but um so who Ben so who benefits by these bubbles these easy uh you know
Created by the Easy Money the low interest rate interest rate environments all the money creation um as you might suspect most of the benefits accrue to the wealthy investor class you know we have the wealthy people they derive most of their money uh income Revenue Etc from their
Investments while the rest of us you know the working folks and and working class and and the Working Poor they derive their income obviously from from their work from their from their labor from the paychecks so just to kind of shed a little perspective on this the wealthiest one
Percent on 53 of all the stocks wealthy is 10 own 89 of all the stocks so that big you know those big bubbles being inflated in the stock market that’s who’s who’s gaining getting receiving most of those gains uh the working class um you know uh you know lower income
Households you know they they own very little stocks and and as thus are not benefiting um housing from 2010 to 2020 about 71 of the increase in housing wealth was gained by high income households uh makes sense you know million dollar homes two million dollar homes that the
More expensive homes they’re much more scarce than you know the quote-unquote average sized home so that scarcity is going to help to drive up particularly drive up prices on those uh more expensive homes uh owned by the wealthy so so so as I mentioned you know so the wealthy they’re they’re benefiting
Greatly from that because that’s that’s where they’re getting their money that’s where they’re accumulating more wealth middle and lower class rely on labor income um so so the money Creation in place asset bubbles that benefit the wealthy the working class and poor however oftentimes lack the bargaining power to
Raise their wages to keep up with the rising prices right so the wealthy they’re benefiting from from their Investments being inflated um meanwhile the cost of living you know for groceries and gas and utility bills and so forth it’s going up it might bother the wealthy a little bit it’s not
It’s not really going to put much of a dent in there too much of a dent in their household um budgets uh but it’s the it’s the working class it’s uh in lower incomes people that are really going to be struggling as the price of those things increase so for example
Um inflation measured inflation over the past year about eight and a half percent however average wages only increased by 5.3 percent so if you’re primarily getting your income from wages you are worse off your wages can are not going they’re not keeping up with the increasing price of
Living so so we have this process unfolding over time you can see how that really exacerbates wealth inequality the wealthy benefiting from um uh you know the the inflationary environment with the asset classes increasing and the working class uh really struggling and falling behind so um
So yeah I just I wanted to leave you with that and and just kind of my goal was really kind of give you an overview of the Federal Reserve talk about their role in inflation give uh provide a little bit of insight in into the mechanics of how they attempt
To manipulate interest rates so you can have a have a little more background you know when you see the headlines coming out about the Federal Reserve targeting interest rates uh and then just just the impact it has on the economy and the different impact that that those inflationary environments have on on the
Wealthier classes and and the lower working uh income working-class households uh and and again as I mentioned a few slides ago go back to that meeting on Jekyll Island who was there it was the big Bankers it was big bank interest JP Morgan Rockefeller interest there um and who benefits really possibly the
Most from these environments well it’s the banks you have more and more money being created that’s more money that they can have to lend out to the to to create loans and that’s how they make their money they earn interest on on the money they’re able to lend out more money
And the money supply means more loans means more interest payments means higher profits for the bank so um I’ll just close you with that thank you for your time and thank you for listening