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Ron Paul's Fed chairman

For both Paul and Gingrich, Jim Grant would be an important player in federal finances.

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Rick Wilking/Reuters
Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul listens to a question at a news conference after a speech at a campaign event in Las Vegas February 1, 2012.
  • By Douglas French Guest blogger

As president, Ron Paul would select Jim Grant as chairman of the Federal Reserve. A president Newt Gingrich would appoint Grant to a gold standard commission. “Unfortunately, I haven’t heard from Mr. Romney yet,” joked Grant when MarketWatch’s Brett Arends called on him in his offices down on Wall Street. “I’m sitting by the phone, I’m ready.”

Arend’s discussion with Grant produces many great points from Wall Street’s foremost wordsmith, including:

“The anachronism is today’s system,” he says. We have a “command and control, top down” system whereby the Federal Reserve imposes an interest rate on society. The Fed, in other words, tells us what the price of money should be. It is, Grant says, oddly at odds with the modern age. “We live in a world of collaborative social networks” of the Internet and Facebook, of Wikipedia instead of the old World Book, and so on. And yet when it comes to the price of money, we wait for a committee that sits in private to tell us what it should be."

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