We provide an overview of the monetary policy failures that resulted in the 2007–2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, focusing on the United States. Before the crisis, monetary policy was too loose, which fueled the bubble. After the bubble burst, monetary policy became too tight, hindering the recovery. These failures are fundamentally due to the Federal Reserve’s discretionary monetary policy. Furthermore, the popular approach of “constrained discretion” is really just discretion. Hence, it is sensitive to all the usual problems with discretionary monetary policy. Only firm monetary rules, ones that actually bind, can maintain macroeconomic stability and prevent crises.

Orthodox monetary policy scholarship assumes that central bankers act to maximize the public welfare. If imperfect incentives enter the model, it is on the part of the public. We challenge this assumption. Monetary policymakers are just as prone to incentive problems, which cause them to act according to their own self-interest. Furthermore, the self-interest of policymakers is not always the same thing as the public welfare. The two diverge frequently, in fact. We survey the history of the Federal Reserve and show the numerous ways discretionary central bankers have been compromised. These incentive problems are an inherent feature of discretion. They can only be eliminated by embracing true monetary rules.

We analyze the information problems inherent in discretionary monetary policy. Discretionary central bankers confront immense informational burdens. Some of these are technical problems only, and can in principle be overcome. But there is also a genuine knowledge problem involved in discretionary monetary policy: reacting in real time to changes in the demand for money. This problem is unsolvable. It renders discretionary central banking systematically unlikely to achieve macroeconomic stability. In contrast, rules-based policy does not confront a knowledge problem.

We conclude by situating the theory and practice of monetary policy within liberal political economy more generally. As we have seen, there are significant tensions between existing monetary institutions (discretionary central banking) and liberal ideals. This has been made even clearer by the Federal Reserve’s response to COVID-19. In brief, the Fed is now engaging in not only monetary policy but fiscal policy as well. This represents an immense expansion in its mandate, one that poses serious challenges for general and predictable monetary policy. The way out of this mess is embracing a comparative institutions approach to monetary policy. We cannot be satisfied with technical refinements to existing models and data. We need to explore alternative monetary policy rules, ones that are effective at providing macroeconomic stability while also respecting the requirements of democracy.

At root, the problems with the Federal Reserve (and many other central banks) are institutional. The repeated recessions and crises in the era of the Fed show that we need a radical reimagination of the basic institutions of monetary policy. In this chapter, we survey the work of the three great classically liberal Nobel laureates of the twentieth century – James Buchanan, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman – to show that each of them gave serious consideration to monetary-institutional fundamentals. Our focus is not on their particular conclusions, but on how they thought about the problems of monetary institutional design. This represents a very different style of scholarship than macroeconomists and monetary economists currently practice. Unless scholars engage the research projects of Buchanan, Hayek, and Friedman, research in monetary economics will not be of much help in achieving lasting macroeconomic stability.

Financial crises are widely perceived to be the reason monetary rules cannot work. The extraordinary challenges posed by crises require policymakers to act discretionarily. We show that this argument is not only wrong but backward: It is more important than ever to have true rules for monetary policy, which actually bind, to cope with financial crises. We show how the Fed failed to respond appropriately to the 2007–2008 crisis. Contrary to the then chairman Bernanke’s public statements, the Fed did not behave as an orthodox lender of last resort. Instead, it experimented with dubious policies that further entrenched moral hazard in the financial system. We criticize these policies, as well as an approach to economics, which we call “triage economics,” that mistakenly supposes the basic rules of price theory provided no guidance in crafting policy responses to crises. A rules-based approach to monetary policy is thus consistent with extreme market turbulence. In fact, rules are how such turbulence is pacified.

In this chapter, we focus on the idea of the rule of law in the classical liberal tradition. The rule of law is a basic jurisprudential norm that undergirds liberal democracies. We show that discretionary central banking is inconsistent with the rule of law. Discretionary central banking fails the test of generality: It benefits special interests, but not the public as a whole. Also, discretionary banking fails the test of predictability: It does not create an environment conducive to reliable public expectations of future policy. For these reasons, it is unlikely that discretionary central banking can be reconciled with self-governance. We reaffirm the imperative of liberal democracy, as well as uncovering monetary institutions that are compatible with liberal democracy. Until we do so, we fail to meet the basic challenge of self-governance.