A recent article on the Cato Institute's website by Alan Reynolds speaks to the fact that the Fed has been acting quite differently with their monetary policy during this time of near $100/barrel crude oil prices in the US. The article claims that Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is deliberately allowing the interest rate to go in the opposite direction of the price of oil right now to play out a theory that it has been the Fed messing with the interest rate that has caused recessions in the past, not the price of oil rising, as the media likes to so often hold up as the simplistic reason for trouble in the economy.

I applaud this decision by the Fed. It would seem that the more involved that the US government gets in the markets of worldwide supply and demand for crude oil, the more likely it is that the markets will respond negatively to this unnecessary external pressure by government to behave as a poor middle-man in the give and take of free-market capitalism. Hopefully the high price of oil will see more renewed efforts by companies that must use petroleum products heavily (primarily the airlines and shipping companies) to invest in better routing software and alternative transportation technologies that are less reliant on oil to produce profits. These measures would obviously be good for many, many other industries (and ultimately consumers) as well.

Now if we could only get Congress (and Hillary) to lay off medical care prices as well, we'd be in even better shape.