"Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act on the 22nd of December 1913, and from that day forward the United States of America ceased to be a republic."
Anne Williamson - THE FED, March 2001, WorldNet, a monthly publication of WorldnetDaily.com.
Central Bankers Meet to Assess Anti-Recession Efforts
The Associated Press
By Joseph Rebello August 29, 2002
Source
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. (Dow Jones/AP) - The world's best-known economists and central bankers are meeting here this weekend to try to decide a question Wall Street resolved long ago: Who is best equipped to fight recessions - elected government officials or central bankers?
Investors are paying attention anyway, hoping that the predictably academic tone of the annual economic conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will not keep Alan Greenspan from shedding light on a more urgent question: Does the Fed need to do more to fight the current U.S. economic downturn?
The U.S. economy, after all, remains sickly despite the unprecedented dose of stimulus it got last year in the form of tax cuts enacted by Congress and interest-rate cuts executed by the Fed. Consumer confidence is wobbly and business investment is tepid. The Fed hinted two weeks ago that it might cut interest rates again, but more recent comments by some Fed policy makers have puzzled investors.
"Alan Greenspan knows what people are interested in," said James Glassman, an economist with J.P. Morgan in New York. "If he chooses to signal anything, he can do so in a few words at this conference. The markets just want to know what the Fed's frame of mind is - what would it take for the Fed to act again" to boost the economy.
Greenspan, who enjoys superstar status among the central bankers gathering in Jackson Hole, is scheduled to deliver a speech at 10 a.m. EDT Friday that kicks off the two-day meeting. He traditionally confines his remarks to the main topic of the conference. But analysts say the topic this time - "Rethinking Stabilization Policy" - is broad enough to give him an opportunity to clarify Wall Street's doubts about the Fed's intentions.
Those doubts grew last week after three Federal Reserve regional bank presidents suggested the Fed should not cut interest rates again despite the central bank's view that the chief risk facing the economy is of a renewed slowdown. Chicago Fed president Michael Moskow said the Fed "cannot - and should not - try to smooth out every bump" in the economy. Investors' expectations of another rate cut this year receded as a result.
The conference also will provide a platform to central bankers from other leading industrial economies to shed light on the outlook for those economies. The deputy governor of Japan's central bank, Yutaka Yamaguchi, is scheduled to make a presentation on monetary policy and economic conditions in his country. He also is likely to hear from other economists on what the Japanese must do to end the country's decade-long recession.
Ottmar Issing, a member of the European Central Bank's executive board, is set to discuss the ECB's efforts. And Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, governor of Mexico's central bank, is scheduled to describe the Mexican experience.
The central bankers, however, typically spend most of their time listening to presentations by top academic economists. Those economists, according to participants in the meeting, are expected to argue that governments are generally ineffective when they try to fend off recessions by cutting taxes or increasing spending. The job of fighting recessions should be left instead to central banks.
That isn't a novel idea. Many Wall Street economists agree that legislatures typically take too long to organize a fiscal stimulus, which means the economy gets that stimulus when it is no longer needed. Still, those economists also say, the U.S. tax cuts last year show that governments can be effective if they manage to act quickly.
"We ended up with a milder recession than we would have had" if tax cuts had not been enacted, said David Jones, an expert on the Fed. "At least this time the timing was much better."
HOW BIG IS THE GOVERNMENT'S DEBT? - 33.1 Trillion - By Andrew J. Rettenmaier, a NCPA senior fellow and the executive associate director of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University.
The Fall of the Republic