'Spread the Fed'

The Fed was originally conceived, and for its first decades operated, as a network of regional development banks. The discounting practices of the Fed District Banks ensured that there was always enough and never too much new money-issuance to fuel production sufficiently voluminous as to absorb the new money - the optimal means of assuring productive growth without inflation or deflation in the 'real' economy. The version of the Real Bills Doctrine (RBD) that guided these practices was spot on where endogenous money is concerned, but overlooked the danger of foreign-sourced exogenous money such as entered the US after the Great War. The upshot was the boom and bust of the 1920s. Congress's subsequent scrapping of the RBD and concentration of Fed functions in a new, New-York-centered Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) rectified the error as to exogenous money, but at the expense of forgetting the much more important role generally played by endogenous money. These books and papers design a 'Goldilocks' Fed that retains exogenous money wisdom while recovering productively endogenous money wisdom, restoring the regional Fed District Banks to their original role.

Image: Paul Warburg, immigrant from late 19th century Germany, whose regionally distributed development banks inspired his original design for what became the US Federal Reserve System.
  1. Spread the Fed: Distributed Central Banking in Pandemic and Beyond
  2. The Once and Future Fed - And Treasury: From Credit Modulo-AllocativeSeparation to Re-Consolidation
  3. Scissors Require Two Blades: Central Bank Independence with(Principled) Central Bank Allocation
  4. The Fed is a Network of Regional Development Banks: Make It Our Bank Again
  5. Community QE: Key Provisions and a 'GamePlan' for Immediate State Action
  6. Community QE2: New Key Provisions and an Updated ‘Game Plan’ for State and Municipal Action
  7. The Fed’s Municipal Liquidity Facility:Present & Future Possibilities & Necessities
  8. Continuous National Development With or Without Congress: The InvestAmerica Plan
  9. Building Back Better Forever
  10. Building Banks Better
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Columns, OpEds, Occasional Journalism

I'm no Marx or Keynes, but like them I do try to accompany most of my scholarly, policy advocacy, and legislative work with more accessible journalistic companion pieces. Here are some of my regular columns for Forbes, The Hill, FT, and Huffington Post, along with other occasional journalism.

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The Green New Deal

The Green New Deal initiative begun in 2018 marked the beginning of a return to ambitious public-private coordination in the cause of rebuilding the American economy along more just, productive, and sustainable lines. Hockett worked with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her team from the start on the GND Resolution introduced to Congress in early 2019, then on the initiative's finance plan as well as much follow-up legislation found in the 'Legislation' Module of this site.

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