Back in 2013 Karl Smith offered a startling rehabilitation of Arthur Burns’s calamitous tenure as Fed Chairman, first under Richard Nixon who appointed him, later under Gerald Ford who reappointed him, and finally, though briefly, under Jimmy Carter who did not reappoint him. Relying on an academic study of Burns by Fed economist Robert Hetzel drawing extensively from Burns’s papers at the Fed, Smith argued that Burns had a more coherent and sophisticated view of how the economy works and of the limitations of monetary policy than normally acknowledged by the standard, and almost uniformly negative, accounts of Burns’s tenure, which portray Burns either as a willing, or as a possibly reluctant, and even browbeaten, accomplice of Nixon in deploying Fed powers to rev up the economy and drive down unemployment to ensure Nixon’s re-election in 1972, in willful disregard of the consequences of an overdose of monetary stimulus.
According…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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