How Vivek Ramaswamy would abolish the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate and mandate dollar stability
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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OTTUMWA, Iowa — Vivek Ramaswamy made waves as the first Republican presidential candidate to abolish the Federal Reserve‘s dual mandate, which legally requires the Fed to balance the two priorities of full employment and price stability. During an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner, the biotech and finance entrepreneur broke down the minutiae of his monetary policy and what steps he would take with and without congressional approval.
“My view is that dollar stability is a critical input to economic growth,” Ramaswamy says, introducing an extended metaphor to illustrate the point. “If the number of minutes in an hour fluctuated, nobody would show up [to] their meetings on time. When the dollar is as volatile as it is, that affects capital allocation in an economy, and so I think that that’s the reality.”
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Ramaswamy insists he supports congressional legislation to abolish the dual mandate, replacing it with the single mandate of dollar stability “versus a basket of commodities,” including gold, silver, nickel, and a range of agricultural commodities. But Ramaswamy doesn’t downplay the potential range of consequences resulting from executive fiat alone.
“I think appointing a chairman of the Federal Reserve, who shares [this] perspective, will itself be a significant step forward in achieving the vision even without any legislation through Congress,” said Ramaswamy, who would be able to appoint a new chairman of the Fed when Jerome Powell’s second term ends in 2026. “Even after we left the gold standard, even throughout the ’80s under Volcker, and specifically guided by the influences of guys like Manley Johnson, the Fed did behave in a manner that still prioritized dollar stability, and that correlated with a period of higher GDP growth than we have today.”
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Unlike GOP front-runner Donald Trump or fellow challenger Mike Pence, the only other candidate to similarly embrace the abolition of the dual mandate, Ramaswamy does not embrace quantitative easing, which arguably helped bolster the economy under the previous presidential administration.
“I’m not a QE person, and I’m not pro-QE,” Ramaswamy said blankly. “I think there are ways in which stabilizing the dollar involves either buying or selling dollars into the marketplace, but their sole purpose would be dollar stability against the basket of commodities. So quantitative easing as a policy goal I’d be against, but some of the behaviors at times could overlap with the same behaviors but with a different end, with respect to dollar stability itself.”