The Federal Reserve System, commonly known as "the Fed", has faced various criticisms since its establishment in 1913. Critics have questioned its effectiveness in managing inflation, regulating the banking system, and stabilizing the economy. Notable critics include Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and his fellow monetarist Anna Schwartz, who argued that the Fed's policies exacerbated the Great Depression. Libertarian figures such as Ron Paul and Rand Paul have called for greater transparency and accountability, with Ron Paul advocating for the Fed's abolition and a return to a gold standard.

Critics have also raised concerns about the Fed's role in fractional reserve banking, its contribution to economic cycles, and its transparency. Expansionary policies, such as lowering interest rates and increasing the money supply, have been blamed for creating asset bubbles, inflation, and other economic distortions. The Fed has been accused of causing economic downturns, including the 2008 financial crisis, and of being influenced by private interests. Its response to that crisis, particularly the bailing out of large financial institutions, has drawn criticism for creating moral hazard and disproportionately benefiting Wall Street at the expense of ordinary citizens. Despite these criticisms, the Federal Reserve remains a central institution in the United States' financial system, with ongoing debates about its role, policies, and the need for reform.

Creation

An early version of the Federal Reserve Act was drafted in 1910 on Jekyll Island, Georgia, by Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, and several Wall Street bankers. The final version, with provisions intended to improve public oversight and weaken the influence of the New York banking establishment, was drafted by Democratic Congressman Carter Glass of Virginia. The structure of the Fed was a compromise between the desire of the bankers for a central bank under their control and the desire of President Woodrow Wilson to create a decentralized structure under public control. The Federal Reserve Act was approved by Congress and signed by President Wilson in December 1913.

Economist Hans Sennholz called the Fed's creation, "the most tragic blunder ever committed by Congress. The day it was passed, old America died and a new era began. A new institution was born that was to cause, or greatly contribute to, the unprecedented economic instability in the decades to come."

Inflation policy In The Case Against the Fed, Murray Rothbard argued in 1994 that, although a supposed core function of the Federal Reserve is to maintain a low level of inflation, its policies (like those of other central banks) have actually aggravated inflation. This occurs when the Fed creates too much fiat money backed by nothing. He called the Fed policy of money creation "legalized counterfeiting" and favored a return to the gold standard. He wrote:

The Federal Reserve has been criticized as not meeting its goals of greater stability and low inflation. This has led to a number of proposed changes including advocacy of different policy rules or dramatic restructuring of the system itself.

Milton Friedman concluded that governments do have a role in the monetary system, he was critical of the Federal Reserve due to its poor performance and felt it should be abolished. Friedman believed that the Federal Reserve System should ultimately be replaced with a computer program. He favored a system that would automatically buy and sell securities in response to changes in the money supply.Friedman, M. (1996). The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory. In Explorations in Economic Liberalism (pp. 3-21). Palgrave Macmillan, London. "It is precisely this leeway, this looseness in the relation, this lack of a mechanical one-to-one correspondence between changes in money and in income that is the primary reason why I have long favored for the USA a quasi-automatic monetary policy under which the quantity of money would grow at a steady rate of 4 or 5 per cent per year, month-in, month-out." This proposal has become known as Friedman's k-percent rule.Salter, A. W. (2014). An Introduction to Monetary Policy Rules. Mercatus Workıng Paper. George Mason University.

Others have proposed NGDP targeting as an alternative rule to guide and improve central bank policy. Prominent supporters include Scott Sumner, David Beckworth, and Tyler Cowen.

Congress Several members of Congress have criticized the Fed. Senator Robert Owen, whose name was on the Glass-Owen Federal Reserve Act, believed that the Fed was not performing as promised. He said: The Federal Reserve Board was created to control, regulate and stabilize credit in the interest of all people. . . . The Federal Reserve Board is the most gigantic financial power in all the world. Instead of using this great power as the Federal Reserve Act intended that it should, the board . . . delegated this power to the banks."Owen criticises reserve board" , The New York Times (July 25, 1921)

Representative Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1920 to 1931, accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately causing the Great Depression. In several speeches made shortly after he lost the chairmanship of the committee, McFadden claimed that the Federal Reserve was run by Wall Street banks and their affiliated European banking houses. In one 1932 House speech (that has been criticized as bluster), he stated:

Many members of Congress who have been involved in the House and Senate Banking and Currency Committees have been open critics of the Federal Reserve, including Chairmen Wright Patman, Henry Reuss, and Henry B. Gonzalez. Representative Ron Paul, Chairman of the Monetary Policy Subcommittee in 2011, is known as a staunch opponent of the Federal Reserve System. He routinely introduced bills to abolish the Federal Reserve System,E.g., H.R. 2755 (110th Congress); H.R. 2778 (108th Congress); H.R. 5356 (107th Congress); H.R. 1148 (106th Congress) three of which gained approval in the House but lost in the Senate.

Congressman Paul also introduced H.R. 459: Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2011, This act required an audit of the Federal Reserve Board and the twelve regional banks, with particular attention to the valuation of its securities. His son, Senator Rand Paul, has introduced similar legislation in subsequent sessions of Congress.

Great Depression (1929)

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz stated that the Fed pursued an erroneously restrictive monetary policy, exacerbating the Great Depression. After the stock market crash in 1929, the Fed continued its contraction (decrease) of the money supply and refused to save banks that were struggling with bank runs. This mistake, critics charge, allowed what might have been a relatively mild recession to explode into catastrophe. Friedman and Schwartz believed that the depression was "a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces." Before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the banking system had dealt with periodic crises (such as in the Panic of 1907) by suspending the convertibility of deposits into currency. In 1907, the system nearly collapsed and there was an extraordinary intervention by an ad-hoc coalition assembled by J. P. Morgan. In the years 1910–1913, the bankers demanded a central bank to address this structural weakness. Friedman suggested that a similar intervention should have been followed during the banking panic at the end of 1930. This might have stopped the vicious circle of forced liquidation of assets at depressed prices, just as suspension of convertibility in 1893 and 1907 had quickly ended the liquidity crises at the time.

Essentially, in the monetarist view, the Great Depression was caused by the fall of the money supply. Friedman and Schwartz note that "[f]rom the cyclical peak in August 1929 to a cyclical trough in March 1933, the stock of money fell by over a third." The result was what Friedman calls "The Great Contraction"—a period of falling income, prices, and employment caused by the choking effects of a restricted money supply. The mechanism suggested by Friedman and Schwartz was that people wanted to hold more money than the Federal Reserve was supplying. People thus hoarded money by consuming less. This, in turn, caused a contraction in employment and production, since prices were not flexible enough to immediately fall. Friedman and Schwartz argued the Federal Reserve allowed the money supply to plummet because of ineptitude and poor leadership.

Many have since agreed with this theory, including Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 until 2014, who, in a speech honoring Friedman and Schwartz, said:

Friedman has said that ideally he would prefer to "abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with a computer." He preferred a system that would increase the money supply at some fixed rate, and he thought that "leaving monetary and banking arrangements to the market would have produced a more satisfactory outcome than was actually achieved through government involvement".

In contrast to Friedman's argument that the Fed did too little to ease after the crisis, Murray Rothbard argued that the crisis was caused by the Fed being too loose in the 1920s in the book America's Great Depression.

2008 financial crisis

Some economists, such as John B. Taylor, have asserted that the Fed was responsible, at least partially, for the United States housing bubble which occurred prior to the 2007 recession. They claim that the Fed kept interest rates too low following the 2001 recession. The housing bubble then led to the credit crunch. Other economists associated with the Austrian School of economics, including former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and historian Tom Woods, have argued that the artificially low interest rates allowed for speculative investments and unsustainable levels of debt, particularly in housing. In Tom Woods' book Meltdown, Woods contends that Federal Reserve manipulation of the money supply and credit markets distorted normal price signals, leading to widespread malinvestment, resulting in an inevitable correction. Then-Chairman Alan Greenspan disputes this interpretation. He points out that the Fed's control over the long-term interest rates (to which critics refer) is only indirect. The Fed did raise the short-term interest rate over which it has control (i.e., the federal funds rate), but the long-term interest rate (which usually follows the former) did not increase.

Paul and Woods also criticized Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's role in the crisis, asserting that the entities engaged in excessive risk-taking by expanding homeownership beyond sustainable levels. In doing this, the government intervention created moral hazard by assuring large financial institutions that they would receive government support in times of crisis, which Paul and Woods believe encouraged riskier behavior.

The Federal Reserve's role as a supervisor and regulator has been criticized as being ineffective. Former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, then-chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, remarked about the Fed's role in the 2007-2008 economic crisis, "We saw over the last number of years when they took on consumer protection responsibilities and the regulation of bank holding companies, it was an abysmal failure."

COVID-19 pandemic During COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve's policies such as rapidly growing the M2, increasing its bank reserves, quantitative easing (QE), and keeping interest rates near zero until March 2022 had been criticised by economists, especially monetarists, as greatly contributing to the inflation spike which peaked at 9.1%, a record high in over 40 years.

Money creation