This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 14th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Federal Reserve turns 100 this year.

Jerry Odriskill, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute,

argues we've learned a lot about the current regime, and it fails on its own terms.

We spoke during today's Cato Monetary Conference, which you can watch or listen to at Cato.org.

We are at the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve this year.

What do we know now clearly that we didn't know then?

What we know now clearly is that in terms of there were two conventional measures of success,

monetary macroeconomic success.

One is the average inflation rate or the volatility of the inflation rate

and the other is various measures of real economic activity like the rate of growth of GDP and its volatility.

Now the record of the Fed on prices is clear.

Prices today are many multiple times over 20 times what they were when the

Fed came into existence. So in terms of the idea that the Fed has any de facto commitment to price stability is obviously

or it either has no commitment or it doesn't know how to do it.

And that record is very bad compared to the historical record of say the classical gold standard

1879 to 1914 where prices at the end of the period were the same as at the beginning. In terms of output

volatility the Fed's record is worse than the record of the pre-fed gold standard arrangement.

Even if you exclude its worst failure, the Great Depression,

it's no better than the gold standard record.

So in terms of standard measures, the Fed is inferior to what was before, which is a strong comparison because no one denies that were problems with the

pre-fed monetary system in the United States.

...