From the Federal Reserve to Strategic Reserves – and Back: A Marriage Proposal

Abstract

The ‘financialization’ of ‘developed’ economies over recent decades has brought us a world in which seemingly near every spot market has a financial market correlate. It has also brought, via the short-termism that it encourages, deindustrialization and productive atrophy. Meanwhile, productive revitalization efforts and geopolitical developments both domestic and foreign have steadily rendered more prices than money rental rates, and more supply inputs than foodstuffs and fuelstuffs, what I call ‘systemically important.’ Our now rapidly re-polarizing, post-‘post-industrial’ world will require open market operations on the part of both liquidity reserves like the US’s Federal Reserve, and strategic commodity reserves like the US’s Commodity Credit Corporation and Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to keep both supplies and their price correlates collared – what the Federal Reserve Act calls ‘stable.’ The upshot is obvious: central banks and strategic stockpiling agencies must conjoin or coordinate their financial and spot market operations in the name of combined price and supply stability in respect of all critical inputs and prices, as the world re-polarizes and developed economies repudiate post-, and embrace now post-post-, industrialization.

Keywords: Chicago Fed, collaring, commodities, commodity credit corporation, derivatives, Federal Reserve System, Financialization, geopolitical economy, globalization, industrialization, post-post-industrialism, prices, re-polarization, strategic petroleum reserve, systemically important prices & indices