This great letter in today’s Wall Street Journal makes an important point:
Reducing the Fed’s role to just guaranteeing the convertibility of dollars into some preset collateral is a step in the right direction as it eliminates the Fed’s discretion, effectively ending its disastrous role as the monetary central planner. Even better would be to end any government involvement in setting the standard for what money should be.
Money is just another good, and as such it can and should be provided by the market. Like any other product, only the free market, with producers vigorously competing and absent any government monopoly, can best discover what form a monetary standard should be and improve on it for the future.
Bob Gelfond
New York
