The Creature from Jekyll Island” is a 1994 book by G. Edward Griffin exposing the secret 1910 meeting of bankers and politicians on Jekyll Island, Georgia, at which the Federal Reserve was conceived, and documenting how the resulting institution serves banking interests rather than the public.
In 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established, an ice cream cone typically cost about $0.05 (a nickel), while the average American home cost around $2,500 to $3,500 to purchase or build. Today, the national average cost of an ice cream cone is about $4.00 to $5.50 for a single scoop, while the median sale price of an existing single-family home in the United States is approximately $404,300.
In 1970, the year before America went off the gold standard, gold traded at an average price of roughly $35.96 to $38.90 per troy ounce. Today, the live spot price of gold is approximately $4,320 to $4,350 per troy ounce.
The Federal Reserve, through its artificial control of interest rates, credit expansion, and increases in the money supply, is the root cause of inflation and the weakening of the U.S. dollar. In the United States, a capitalist country, we trust the market to set the price of shoes, sandwiches, movie tickets, and cars. Why do we not trust the market to set a market-driven interest rate?
If interest rates were determined by the market, they would never be artificially too high or too low, and America could avoid the cycles of boom and bust fueled by cheap money. Whether during a boom or a bust, both periods ultimately result in a weaker U.S. dollar. Eliminating the Fed would make the dollar stronger and economy more stable.
Before examining how the Fed contributes to inflation, currency devaluation, and economic instability, a few common misconceptions should be addressed.
First, it is not a hidden secret that the Federal Reserve is not a direct agency of the U.S. government. This is publicly available information. The Fed is a federally chartered, operationally independent institution. Its Board of Governors is a federal agency whose members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, while its 12 regional Reserve Banks are privately owned by member commercial banks. Congress retains the authority to alter or abolish the Fed by legislation.
Second, this arrangement is not unusual. Nearly every country has a central bank, although it may operate under a different name. Central banks exist on a spectrum from fully independent to fully government-controlled, with most operating as hybrids that combine varying degrees of operational independence with government oversight and accountability. The Federal Reserve is simply the American version of a central bank.
The Federal Reserve, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, operates through three primary mechanisms: setting the federal funds rate, conducting open market operations, and regulating reserve requirements for commercial banks.
The core of its money-creation power lies in open market operations. The Fed controls the monetary base, currency in circulation plus deposit balances that depository institutions hold at the Fed, by buying or selling securities. When the Fed buys a security, it pays by crediting the bank’s reserve account. No prior savings are required. The reserves are created by accounting entry.
Those reserves flow into the broader economy through fractional reserve banking. When you deposit $1,000 in a bank, the bank keeps a fraction and lends out the rest. That money, spent and redeposited elsewhere, is lent out again. Through this money multiplier effect, banks expand the money supply well beyond the original deposit.
Since March 2020, the reserve requirement floor has been set at zero, meaning US banks face no mandatory reserve floor at all. The only remaining brake on credit expansion is the interest rate the Fed itself sets and can raise or lower at will.
The federal funds rate is the rate at which commercial banks lend and borrow excess reserves overnight. The FOMC meets eight times annually to set this target. This single administered price, set by committee rather than by markets, governs the cost of capital for the world’s largest economy.
The Austrian School of Economics, the discipline in which the author of this article has his master’s degree, is rooted in the work of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, and holds that the interest rate is not a policy instrument. It is a price, the price of time, that emerges from the aggregate time preferences of millions of individuals. When people save more, the natural rate falls, signaling that resources are available for longer-term investment.
When they save less, it rises, rationing credit toward shorter, more certain projects. The moment a central bank sets the interest rate below its natural market level, it sends a false signal throughout the economy, and because the interest rate coordinates all intertemporal investment decisions simultaneously, that signal is the most consequential false signal possible.
In layman’s terms, if people are saving heavily, it signals that they are deferring consumption and that capital is available for long-term projects. Builders start construction, factories expand, businesses invest. If people are spending rather than saving, it signals that capital is scarce and that only short-term, high-confidence projects should proceed. The interest rate is the mechanism that transmits this information across the entire economy simultaneously.
When the Fed artificially lowers the rate, it tells every borrower that capital is abundant even when it is not. Businesses take out loans to build factories that consumers cannot ultimately afford to buy from. Homebuyers take on mortgages at prices the market cannot sustain. When the fiction is exposed, the correction is painful, which is precisely what happened in 2008, when a decade of artificially cheap money produced a housing market that collapsed the moment rates normalized.
Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), developed by Mises in his 1912 Theory of Money and Credit and elaborated by Hayek through the 1930s, holds that when banks expand credit beyond genuine savings, supported by artificially low central bank rates, they stimulate economic activity by making previously unprofitable projects appear viable. This is malinvestment, not merely overinvestment, but investment in the wrong things. Demand for materials and labor rises, prices follow, and the boom appears real. The artificially reduced loan rate simultaneously misleads households into a falsely optimistic appraisal of their income and net worth, stimulating consumption beyond what genuine savings support.
Mises and Hayek were among the few economists who predicted the Great Depression before it arrived. ABCT holds that it would not have occurred had the Federal Reserve not expanded the money supply and artificially suppressed interest rates throughout the 1920s.
The Austrian School also maintains that government welfare programs and spending intended to inject liquidity into the economy prolonged the Great Depression. By preventing the liquidation of malinvestments and keeping wages and prices artificially high, New Deal policies blocked the market clearing process that would have allowed the economy to self-correct within a relatively short period. The 1920-1921 depression, which the government largely left alone, supports this view: it resolved rapidly without intervention.
Instead, according to the Austrian view, government attempts to manage the economy delayed the necessary adjustment process. The depression persisted until World War II, when a massive expansion of credit, money supply, and government spending created an artificial boom. World War II also produced the largest single expansion of federal debt to that point, taking the debt-to-GDP ratio to approximately 119% by 1946, representing the most dramatic escalation of government borrowing in American history up to that time.
Austrian Business Cycle Theory is one reason why this author, and other economists trained in the Austrian School, believed Joe Biden was mentally incompetent for believing he could spend his way out of an inflationary crisis. Following the COVID-era shutdowns, Biden signed into law three of the largest spending bills in American history: the American Rescue Plan at $1.9 trillion, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act at $1.2 trillion, and the Inflation Reduction Act at approximately $750 billion over ten years. The premise underlying all three was that government spending and economic stimulus could restore growth and combat inflation.
While Austrians disagree with Biden, even the mainstream economics taught at high schools and universities across the country does not generally teach that inflation is cured by flooding the economy with more money and spending.
To understand why governments consistently choose policies that expand spending, create money, and accumulate debt, it is necessary to understand the competing schools of economic thought that underpin these decisions.
The school which most governments, including the US government, subscribe to is called Keynesian economics, developed by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes argued that governments could and should intervene in the economy through spending and money creation, particularly during downturns. His theory holds that when private demand falls, government spending can fill the gap, stimulate growth, and restore employment. Crucially, Keynes argued this could be done through borrowing and money creation rather than requiring governments to first collect taxes to fund expenditure.
For politicians, Keynesian economics is enormously appealing. It provides theoretical justification for spending programs that generate votes without requiring immediate sacrifice from the public. Infrastructure projects, welfare programs, stimulus checks, and bailouts all become economically defensible under the Keynesian framework.
Austrian economics offers no such comfort. It emphasizes disciplined spending and delayed gratification. It holds that resources are finite, that credit expansion is not the same as real wealth creation, and that debt accumulated today must be repaid through future taxation, inflation, or default. Spending money you do not have may win elections, but it does not create lasting prosperity. Instead, it creates a snowballing debt burden that now stands at approximately 120% of US GDP.
Rather than contracting the money supply and cutting spending, the Biden administration attributed rising prices primarily to supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic shutdowns. However, this explanation has not held up. Supply chains have normalized since COVID, yet prices have not returned to pre-pandemic levels and show no trajectory toward doing so. If supply chain disruption were the primary cause, prices should have fallen as supply chains recovered. They did not.
The permanent upward shift in the price level is consistent with the Austrian explanation: when the money supply expands by $3.8 trillion in a single year, as it did in 2020, prices rise and do not come back down. The disruption created the initial shock. The monetary expansion made it permanent.
None of this credit expansion, money-supply expansion, weakening of the dollar, or the resulting booms, busts, and inflation would be possible if not for the Federal Reserve enabling government overspending by creating money and artificially controlling interest rates.
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