Drunk college kids, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve

Imagine a college dormitory, students away from home, and available alcohol.

In any student population, some will drink too much. But most will do fine.

Now suppose a Dean of Students who installs a bar in the dorm and subsidizes the price of booze, especially for favored students. Not surprisingly, the amount of student drunkenness and wild partying increases.

Most people outside the college blame the students for being immature, reckless and dangerous. They call for stricter controls on the grounds that obviously students can’t be trusted. And that’s reasonable because the drunk students do deserve blame.

But those outsiders often miss entirely the role of the Dean as facilitator, and most outsiders will unfairly tar all students, most of whom don’t drink too much, with the same brush.

That’s how I think about government central banks (e.g., the Federal Reserve) and its relation to the financial sector (e.g., Wall Street).

1 thought on “Drunk college kids, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve”

  1. And the dean of students college buddy owns the liquor store. It got to the point they couldn’t stop serving because the effect of withdrawal would be too much for the students to handle, so instead they brought out the jungle juice and said F’ it we are going to party. At that point the dean of students jumped on the table and ripped his shirt off , started twirling around his head! The crowd went wild. The dean had never felt so good. Everything was right.

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