People Who Made a Difference: Marriner S. Eccles
Or maybe Hoover wouldn't have liked Eccles pragmatic reversals, despite their shared strength of character?
It took a leftist democrat to listen to a pragmatic republican? :)
A bias to action often seems to come from unpredictable combinations!
Today, you'd think more of the many groups squabbling over irrelevant details could take FDR & Eccles as an example, and build amazing success from unpredictable permutations. We have lots of options worth exploring. Can we just allow ourselves to fall into some success that none of us has fully predicted? Or is eveyone too arrogant to allow ownership of progress to pass to their kids?
Arranged marriages between emerging situations and what we presume simply doesn't guarantee future success. Why not partner more with the people YOU'RE sure are wrong?
There is no point of stability in the natural world that is not a dynamic equilibrium between diverse, conflicting forces. Enough people pushing and sharing diverse mistakes is always what hems in success.
A bias to action often seems to come from unpredictable combinations!
Today, you'd think more of the many groups squabbling over irrelevant details could take FDR & Eccles as an example, and build amazing success from unpredictable permutations. We have lots of options worth exploring. Can we just allow ourselves to fall into some success that none of us has fully predicted? Or is eveyone too arrogant to allow ownership of progress to pass to their kids?
Arranged marriages between emerging situations and what we presume simply doesn't guarantee future success. Why not partner more with the people YOU'RE sure are wrong?
There is no point of stability in the natural world that is not a dynamic equilibrium between diverse, conflicting forces. Enough people pushing and sharing diverse mistakes is always what hems in success.
of course, the long unraveling of the Treasury/Fed alignment started immediately in 1933, but you can trace the unwinding, from the 1951 accord all the way to gutting Glass-Steagall.
ReplyDeleteMarriner S. Eccles and the 1951 Treasury – Federal Reserve Accord:
Lessons for Central Bank Independence
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_747.pdf
also a lesson for macroeconomic decline
Well, some do allege that Joseph Smith was at first a "gold digger" in the early 1800s:
ReplyDeletehttp://faithandteachings.com/?p=78
“One of the first objections that was urged against Joseph Smith,” recalled President Brigham Young in 1868, “was that he was a money digger; and now,” he said, “the digging of gold is considered an honorable and praiseworthy employment."
Perhaps not Smith, but it is revealing that certainly to Young here some years later, manifestly "gold" = "money"...
Maybe Eccles longed for a return to a system of "digging" gold....
rsp,
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhat is a dynamic equilibrium? Is it equilibrium which indicates a condition that does not change over time? Or is it dynamic which indicates a change over time?
ReplyDelete"dynamic equilibrium"
ReplyDeleteBit of a misnomer, but that's our common idiom for you.
For things to appear to stay the same - or slowly adapt - everything must change (below the surface).
For example, most people, when asked, say they haven't changed. Yet at the neuronal, physiological & molecular level - they change at sub-second, sub millisecond & sub-microsend rates.
Ditto for semantics, linguistics, cultures & economies. To preserve the "Union" - a lot is changing, daily.
That's how a lot of dynamic systems keep us at a survivably adapting semi-equilibrium.
but it is revealing that certainly to Young here some years later, manifestly "gold" = "money"
ReplyDeleteHey, stop throwing (shiny) rocks at my ancestors. I disagree on this and on many other things with uncle Brigham, but then I didn't get to pick my forebears...
From the Levy paper:
ReplyDelete"With Treasury facing a deficit of unknown size it was no longer the
responsibility of the Federal Reserve System to underwrite the public debt at fixed prices, but
rather “to do everything in its power to curb further expansion of the money supply and further
depreciation in the purchasing power of the dollar” (Eccles 1951d, p. 4)."
This sounds like our own Bob Roddis could have written this... "stolen purchasing power! blah blah..."
One can see that by 1951 here, Eccles was exhibiting the behaviour of a full blown monetarist...
This view, ie monetarism, is at core based on a "gold standard mentality".
It is based on a view of "money" as being derived from nature NOT of law; hence you see terms such as "inflation", "debasing", "dilution", etc... All words from the NATURAL sciences.
If one has a firm view of "money" as being "derived NOT of nature, but of law" one would never use terms such as these borrowed from the natural sciences.
Eccles was blind and off the rails by 1951 here...
rsp,