The name is Dr. Judy Shelton. She's a long-time advocate for what I consider sane monetary policy, and "real money" - which is to say money that can't be created in any quantity whenever desired. She once called the Federal Reserve Bank "almost a rogue agency" and questioned whether it could be trusted in having oversight of the dollar.
What brings her name back? To be 100% open, I've been pondering writing on some of the economic mess that's in the back drop for all the politics sucking up headlines all the the time. I was looking at some of my previous pondering on going back to something like a gold standard that can't just be revalued at any time the bankers want. While looking around, headlines showed up saying Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent had hired Dr. Shelton as a counselor to the Secretary. That was back on October 9th, so recent news that I was unaware of.
WASHINGTON— Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced today a key senior appointment at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Dr. Judy Shelton will serve as a Counselor in the Office of the Secretary.
Shelton is an economist and author specializing in international financial and currency issues. She previously served as U.S. Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and as Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. She has testified numerous times before Congress as an expert witness on international financial relations and has consulted with national security officials on global economic developments.
At Treasury, Shelton will advise the Secretary on currency policy, with a particular focus on evaluating financial conditions in China.
Dr. Shelton has been involved politics as far back as I can read, working on the campaigns of Bob Dole ('96), Trump (both campaigns) and Dr. Ben Carson's ('16). She has advocated that the US Treasury should sell not just "futures" to pay some return after some number of years, but sell Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) which would be redeemable in either dollars or gold, effectively tying the two together without a formal gold standard.
One of the things I bitch about pretty regularly is that we've been off a real money system for so long - really since the 1913 creation of the Fed, with some historical events along the way that made things worse - for so long that people don't think at their gut level that the prices associated with things like the assessed value of their house, or even their pay, go up partly to cover the "constant benign inflation" the Fed pushes on us. The Fed claims they're aiming for 2 to 3% but rarely achieve that. They create that inflation by printing more money, more money drives prices of everything up. If you work providing "goods or services", you have to pay more for your raw materials to make your product and you have to pay more to the people that turn things into that product. If you're that worker, you expect your pay to go up at least every year. If there's no Central Bank driven inflation, you probably don't get that automatically. The trade being that the cost of everything hasn't gone up, either.
Dr. Shelton on a Fox Business News video dated September 21, 2022. Image credit: screen capture from the video. Interview with Larry Kudlow.
Almost a rogue agency?
ReplyDeleteThe Dow/Gold ratio peaked in 1999 and has fallen of a cliff since then. If you measure the Dow in gold rather than dollars, we have been in a bear market for 27 years. Yet most who sell stocks are still paying capital gains taxes. The 1999 peak coincided with the blow up of mortgages when houses were selling with zero down and no job held by mortgage holder. Politicians, banks, and buyers went insane. indyjones
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