 Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, the Federal Reserve was handed a new climate change mandate recently, but there's another mandate right around the corner that it's very ill-prepared to take on. The climate change mandate is advisory for now, but eventually it will require banks to make loans based on environmental concerns. Much like the Community Reinvestment Act, it will force the banks to take on bad loans that will have to be subsidized either by the taxpayer or the consumer. The cloaked mandate that I think the Fed will soon face is another round of monetary chaos when the Fed is backed into the corner with no good moves left to make. The first round of monetary chaos occurred in the late 1970s. This was an era of very high inflation and high unemployment, economic uncertainty with mortgage rates three times as high as they are right now, and unemployment in double-digit figures. The government, at the time, responded with monetary decontrol acts giving the Fed greater power. Paul Volcker reversed course and raised interest rates significantly, and then we saw in the late 70s the Humphrey Hawkins' full employment mandate and, of course, later on the Reagan tax cuts. The price of gold in this round of monetary chaos rose from $35 an ounce to $850 an ounce and would later fall to about $250 an ounce. On the positive side, the response to the free market and the voluntary actions we saw tax revolts in the United States in the late 1970s. We saw the emergency of Ron Paul and the establishment of the Mises Institute in 1982. The second round of monetary chaos is more recent in the aftermath of the tech bubble, the housing bubble, and the great financial crisis that involved massive bailouts by the government and the Federal Reserve for banks, radical new monetary policies such as quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy. The Fed took over the mortgage market and bought up tons of federal debt. The price of gold rose from $600 an ounce during the housing bubble to almost $1,900 an ounce before retreating to about $1,000 an ounce. During this round of monetary chaos, we had the reemergency of Ron Paul, his book End the Fed, the Audit the Fed Movement, which unfortunately died in Congressional Committee, and of course the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009 as a direct affront to the Fed and the government bailouts. We had the emergence of, for example, Tom Woods and his book Meltdown and other people who became prominent, especially in social media as a result of this crisis, the government's own doing, and it's very much backward-looking policies to address it. Now here we are, roughly 15 years later, of radical monetary policy that they never really led up on from the previous crisis. They never really took their foot off the gas. And then in 2000, when the economy weakened and COVID hit, the federal government responded with trillions of dollars of so-called stimulus money. The Federal Reserve responded with expansions of money, also of trillions of dollars. Monetary chaos in its wake. We now have high inflation. We have widespread economic hardship, and we have widespread division in the American population as well as within government itself. The price of gold has reached back to $2,000 an ounce so far, and the government has a lot of, and the Federal Reserve especially, has a lot of bad policies in mind to address the crisis once it comes, including central bank digital currencies, policies involving a cashless society where they get to monitor every transaction, massive bailouts of the banks, nationalization of banks, and other failures that it has caused, as well as unknown policy choices that the government would like to make that are loosely associated with the great reset in the World Economic Forum. On the good hand of the ledger, in terms of Fed mandates, we could have a mandate that simply forced the Fed to a zero inflation rate, as advocated recently by Alex Pollock. We still have the end the Fed movement. We still have the return to the gold standard movement, but those monetary policy reforms need to become more concrete, spreading from the states to the federal government, as well as significant revolts against government spending, government policies of all sorts, and of course tax revolts across the country. When we revolt, when we respond, the government responds more favorably, and if we sit back and simply take it sitting at home in fear, we're going to get a lot more bad choices. That's a lesson of history that we can't ignore.