Word: program
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Paul A. Volcker, the cigar-chomping chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, sent America off on its latest economic wilderness adventure by announcing two weeks ago an anti-inflation program that did not just raise the discount rate--the Fed's interest rate on money it lends to member banks--but changed the very nature of how the Fed controls the money supply. Instead of trying to curtail the boom in credit by manipulating interest rates, Volcker announced, the Fed would henceforth apply direct controls to the money supply, raising member banks' reserve requirements and using other methods to keep...
...world jumped, in different directions. International financiers praised Volcker's move; after all, he announced the policy immediately after returning from an International Monetary Fund conference in Belgrade, where those same financiers had most likely given him a pep talk for such a program. Stock market investors ran scared, seeing only the deepening recession Volcker's plan would induce. Liberal politicians didn't like this talk of lowering the standard of living for the sake of such unromantic concepts as "managing the money aggregates." Bankers, who had always looked to the Fed as a bellwether for interest rates, were...
...among the only Americans with reason to rejoice over Volcker's moves, waffled. For the first time a financial official seemed to be taking their advice to heart; conservative monetarists have called for direct control of the money supply for years. But Friedman wrote a week after the program's announcement that the new Fed policy had to be fully carried through or it wouldn't work. In other words, if the policy reduces inflation then the monetarists will take credit, but if it doesn't they can say their ideas failed because Volcker adulterated them...
...take up inflation's slack by letting prices and business production outstrip the consumer's buying power. As Andrew Tobias has pointed out, though, the U.S. pays $65 billion annually to foreign oil producers, and that by far should be the chief target of any anti-inflationary program. Let the "living standard" that has Americans riding mammoth cars and wasting electricity fall, not the standard that keeps food on their tables and money in their savings accounts...
...seems to work. "Many kids get turned on to business and go back to high school," Kathleen Carey, teacher-in-charge and a founder of the program, says. "Others go on to get a job. Yes, some do go on to jail but all things considered this place runs pretty smoothly. We are pleased with our success...