This is one of our favorite clips, which we're reposting given these comments from Greenspan over the weekend...
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Video - Jim Grant with Tom Keene on QE2 - Bloomberg Aired Oct. 8, 2010
Outstanding discussion. Very first question from Tom Keene:
When even cool, calm and collected pundits like Jim Grant fall into murderous paroxysm of blind rage when discussing the Fed, you know it is only a matter of time before the world's most destructive organization is eliminated.
Quote from Grant:
"H. Parker Willis was present at the creation of the Fed, he was one of the draftsmen of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Willis was also the first secretary of the Federal Reserve Board -- he knows this institution. He wrote a book in 1936, which was a lamentation about the low estate of Central Banking in America, the Fed had lost its way in 1936. It had opened its doors in 1914 and by 1936 it had eaten the forbidden fruit, it was in the business of guiding the economy, of managing the economy, of manipulating this aggregate and that, and Willis said: "For Pete's sake. You can't know that -- the GDP data are not reliable enough for you to do what you think you are doing." It's a wonderful tract against the tendency of the Fed to do what it has so lethally done to this economy in my opinion, which is to steer us, in the interest of raising the GDP it presses interest rates to zero, pouring out immense volumes of econometric studies in support of this dubious enterprise. Hey Fed: just attend to the dollar, that's it, no inflation, just do one thing! You've heard of mission creep, these guys are the mission creeps par excellence."
Here's the link to watch at Bloomberg in case this video gets pulled