That's surely a screaming failure by every pre-1980s notion of the role of the central bank because in those halcyon times maintaining the integrity of the currency ranked high above all other considerations.

As it happened, after the 1920 recession had purged the inflationary breakout caused by printing press financing of the US entry into WWI, the Fed did actually deliver on something close to it original sound money remit.

Notwithstanding the 26 years of boom, bust and war after 1920, the consumer's dollar had the same purchasing power in October 1946 as it had in June 1920.

And, no, price stability was not purchased at the expense of jobs and growth, as the Fed's fanboys want you to believe. In fact, the nation's GNP of $75 billion in 1919 had risen to nearly $190 billion by 1947, representing a 3.5% per annum growth rate during a quarter century period when the US price level had not risen at all on a net basis.

Likewise, US employment grew from 40.8 million to 57.8 million during this 26 year period, representing a 1.5% per annum gain. Again, that is more than double the 0.61% per annum employment growth average over Q4 2007 and Q4 2025. And the latter anemic rate occurred when activist labor market stimulation was in full force under Bernanke, Yellen and Powell.

So the notion that the Fed must be constantly in the business of jiggling interest rates and financial market conditions in a delicate dance between keeping inflation low and growth and job creation high is just a lot of self-serving nonsense.

If you look at a longer-term history than is permitted by today's extreme recency bias, it is more than evident that America's capitalist economy needs no help from the central bank whatsoever to generate robust growth and wealth production.

But what the central bank does do—consistently and egregiously—is to err on the side of too much fiat credit production and therefore too much inflation over time. After all, how much more proof do you need than the 97% depreciation of the dollar's purchasing power since 1913?

In this context, Paul Volcker's last stand for sound money provides yet another in-the-flesh demonstration that pre-Greenspan central banking was mainly about price stability even if it failed to achieve it—not the latter day Keynesian obsessions with growth and employment stimulation.

For want of doubt, here is the path of the CPI on a Y/Y basis from the day Volcker was sworn-in to the moment he was unceremoniously relieved of his Chairmanship by the White House pols. The latter bamboozled the hard-money, gold-standard supporting Ronald Reagan during his final year in office into replacing Volcker with the disastrous "wealth effects" regime of Alan Greenspan.

As it happened, Volcker inherited an inflationary dumpster fire from his two predecessors, the hapless golf cart manufacturer, Bill Miller, and the rubbery-spinned academic, Arthur Burns.