This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 2nd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Federal Reserve is supposed to worry about both

employment and inflation.

What have we learned about how Central Banks function that tells us why inflation ought to be

the sole target for monetary authorities?

Peter Ireland teaches economics at Boston College.

We spoke during the Cato Institute's monetary conference last month.

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate.

It does.

And what are the stresses that that creates either within the Fed or between the

Fed and Congress? Right. Well, I think this is key. You brought up Congress. I think that the people who really benefit from the dual mandate are not

Federal Reserve officials or even the American workers who would care about unemployment as well as inflation.

It serves best members of Congress themselves.

It means that every

Federal Reserve official can be accompanied by

politicians on both sides of the aisle

railing against the Fed,

one side perhaps accusing the Fed of being insufficiently hard on inflation, the other

side insufficiently caring about the unemployed.

So the dual mandate gives politicians

the opportunity to turn testimony

that should be focused on making monetary policy

...