Of course, anyone can say that a strong dollar is in the best interests of the US economy, just as anyone can say that we should all live forever, but simply saying so does not make it so, as the chart above would tend to imply. But then pretty much everything about the Federal Reserve amounts to a contradiction in terms. The Fed's own website makes a pretty good fist of Orwellian doublespeak:

"The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, provides the nation with a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system."

Anybody charged with managing investments during the last several years would feel obliged to take issue with just about every assertion in that overbold policy statement (note that its remit is stated as fact, not just objective; as the phrase has it, "Mission Accomplished"). The Fed may fulfil the role of a central bank but it is a private banking cartel, a tool of Wall Street rather than its master. If the Fed has given us safety in the financial system, it would be interesting to see what chaos looked like. The same goes for stability, monetary and otherwise. On this last point, the Fed's assertions about inflation go beyond the debatable to the outright surreal. Express inflation not as some woolly, easily manipulable measure of goods prices, prone to endless adjustment by a craven Fed, but instead as a straightforward increase in the money supply, and it looks like this:

David Fuller's view The money supply graph (see Tim Price's report) speaks for itself but every person charged with paying the household bills knows the true inflation story. This problem is unlikely to go away anytime soon, although good crop yields would alleviate food price inflation somewhat.