? or audit it, you might appreciate the work of Thomas Hoenig, who heads the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
This is Tom Hoenig’s moment, and it’s a strange one. In Washington, he is the burr in Fed Chairman Bernanke’s saddle: the rogue heartland banker who keeps dissenting alone?for the sixth straight time on Sept. 21?to protest the Fed’s rock-bottom interest-rate policy. Hoenig warns that the Bernanke majority is setting the country up for an as-yet-unknown asset bubble: the next dot-com or subprime craze. He can’t tell yet where the boom-and-bust will materialize, but he can feel it coming, like a Missouri wheat farmer senses in his bones the storm that’s just over the horizon.
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The son of an Iowa plumber, he argues that it’s not primarily inflation he fears but the reckless borrowing and distortions engendered by sustained low interest rates. The hard truth, in his view, is that there just isn’t much more the Fed can do to help, and we all ought to admit that.
