It is too easy to mock the Fed for entangling itself in a bureaucratic turf feud and fiddling while Rome was burning. Both parties to the debate were in fact right. The Board was undoubtedly correct that with the demand for money on Wall Street so strong, call money averaging over 10 percent, sometimes spiking as high as 20 percent, and speculators counting on gains of 25 percent a year and more, a hike in the Fed’s discount rate from 5 percent to 6 percent or even 7 percent at this stage of the game was going to have almost no effect. To be sure of pricking the bubble would have required
...more
