Government Myopia, Obamanomics ... and the Fed

 

"The Fed spends $85 billion a month

 purchasing Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

That’s the amount of the entire sequester for fiscal year 2013."

 

MarketWatch interviewed Allan Meltzer, author of a three-volume history of the Federal Reserve.

At 85, Meltzer’s mind is ever-brilliant, but his mood was cloudy. “We’re in the biggest mess we’ve been in since the 1930s,” he told me. “We’ve never had a more problematic future.”

[....]

Governments by nature are more concerned about what happens today than what happens in the future, Meltzer told me. So there is little pressure on the Fed to unwind its positions and raise rates. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner believed in taking care of today’s problems today, and letting tomorrow take care of itself. The Fed suffers from the same myopia.

 

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Meltzer's right: governments -- at least modern ones -- are more concerned about today than tomorrow. To a large extent, though, that applies to people as well as governments. At the core of most of our problems today is the present-mindedness of a large part of the American electorate. The whole have-no-children gimme-gimme-gimme segment of our society -- the segment that twice voted for Obama -- can be characterized by that one word: present-minded. Synonyms: juvenile ... adolescent ... childish. Disheartening, isn't it?

[Yael]

Mannie, take heart. The Omnipresent Won got 3.5 million LESS votes the second time.

[Mannie Sherberg]

Point well taken, Yael. My point -- which I failed to make -- is that most Western governments are in the hands of the Left -- and the Left is notoriously present-minded, demanding instant gratification and taking an "in the long run we're all dead" approach to most things. Any genuinely conservative government -- and any genuinely conservative electorate -- would be marked by a serious and omnipresent concern for the future. The rampaging rates of abortion in most Western countries is a good example: killing off future generations is tantamount to killing off the future of the nation -- but damned few governments, if any, seem to care. They're all about "now" -- and societies that are all about "now" rarely have much of a tomorrow.