So argues Sheldon Richman in this column. The Fed’s various machinations and manipulations do nothing to stabilize the economy, but instead help to destabilize it. The Fed can do nothing to improve upon the free market’s incentives and allocation of resources for the production of goods and services consumers desire, but it can and does interfere with them. The creation of the Fed back in 1913 was a terrible overreaction to the banking panic of 1907 — an early instance of a powerful interest group not “allowing a crisis to go to waste.”