The late, great economist and historian of the Federal Reserve, Allan Meltzer – whose three-volume history of the Fed stands alone as a magisterial, meticulous analysis of Fed decision making – frequently testified before Congress about the failings of the Fed and how to fix them. Meltzer would point out that, over its first century, the Fed’s policy record can only be regarded as successful less than a third of the time (which includes most of the 1920s, the years from about 1991 to about 2001, and a few more years here and there). The rest of the time the results were bad by any imaginable standard.
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