Morgan O. Reynolds on Court Intellectual and Fed Insider Frederic S. Mishkin

Another prominent economist is Frederic S. Mishkin, professor at the Columbia Business School and former member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve System, who fiercely defends the effectiveness of monetary policy: “…financial crises of the type we have been experiencing provide a strong argument for even more aggressive monetary policy easing than normal.”  And aggressive “easing” (not “inflating” or printing) we have certainly had, in spades, thanks to court intellectuals such as Mishkin. Recent estimates put the sum of all emergency bailouts at more than $20 trillion. Professor Mishkin, author of 15 books and numerous articles on monetary policy, is a Fed insider. We can therefore expect little (radical) insight from him on financial fundamentals, and he delivers none. No, Mishkin concentrates on policy “refinements” like “inflation targeting.”

--Morgan O. Reynolds, "The Poverty of Modern Macroeconomic Theory and Power of Austrian Business Cycle Theory," Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 13, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 21.