From Paul Volcker, in the foreword to The Central Banks, by Marjorie Deane and Robert Pringle (1995):
We sometimes forget that central banking as we know it today is, in fact, largely an invention of the past hundred years or so, even though a few central banks can trace their ancestry back to the early nineteenth century or before.
It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. If the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with `free banking.’
The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.
A dollar today buys what a few pennies did back in 1913, when the Federal Reserve came into existence. Since that time, America has experienced both its worst depression and worst inflation, and the record of promoting macroeconomic stability by central banks is no better elsewhere. Yet, somehow, central banks are reckoned a success, indispensable institutions without which no modern economy can hope to survive. The next financial crisis should prompt a scathing reexamination of that article of conventional wisdom, and, it is hoped, abolition of central banks and their replacement by a wholly privatized monetary system.
Regarding the last paragraph:
1. Sentences #1 and #2 are certainly true about the horrors of the Fed.
2, Sentence #3 wonders why the Fed is held in high regard.
3. Lastly, sentence #4 uses “should” and “hoped” relative to getting the Fed abolished.
Thus, I don’t get a very good feeling that much, if anything, soon will happen. Ivor Benson (I think) once said that the maximum size of this circus would be reached when the debt has expanded to the extent that GDP just covered the interest payment. Maybe then someone will come up with a plan similar the sentence #4 proposal.