It's not quite that. Someone is going to manipulate if not outright control the money supply and the various subsidiaries of that river. And in principle, even

It's not quite that. Someone is going to manipulate if not outright control the money supply and the various subsidiaries of that river. And in principle, even quasi-elected and/or quasi-appointed governors of a quasi-public entity are subject to dramatically more scrutiny by full metal jacket elected officials than leaders in the private sector. The kind of tinker-toy reductio absurdum is a pure gold standard with a de Beers-style mineral cartel governance, for which there is ample precedent. In that event, do you want the CEOs of metal mining companies to determine the interest rates or ostensible public servants? The debt-originated, pure fiat, fractional reserve banking system is the highest performing one we know about under uncorrupted and competent leadership. It's got the highest peak output (existential proofs via natural experiment are abundant). But it is more easily corrupted and captured than other systems, which is a kind of hyper-fragility in the current broad-spectrum climate. I don't care if you call it a conspiracy or an emergent phenomenon or an unstable Nash equilibria symmetry group with spontaneous symmetry breaking state space regions: the outcomes at the moment are consistent with our society collectively deciding that its singular goal is to maximize the Gini Coefficient at any cost up to and including arbitrary human life and arbitrary damage to the planet. It tends to polarize people less and bring out less low-signal, one-bit tribalism if we collectivize the agency across everyone as a notational convenience as opposed to addressing the underlying class dynamics, so let's go with that: one way or another all of society is united in the pursuit of maximum wealth inequality, the fungibility of wealth into political capital, that power's use for the inducement of market failures that super-linearly increase this capture in a tight loop. Under that system it doesn't matter if Jerome Powell or Sam Blankman Fried are in charge of the availability of credit: they're going to turn the knobs the same way. The real shame of all this is that it's basically one person's fault and was avoidable. Karl Marx was a deeply insightful scholar in flashes of intuition, but not a rigorously analytical thinker, and he bundled a blindingly accurate forecast of the problems with a disastrously bad set of policy prescriptions, thereby tarnishing the good name of far better analysts who almost always get it right (Graeber comes to mind may he rest). It is in fact that case that in the presence of rapid compound GDP growth and loosely but consistently correlated technological advance that class dynamics become the whole show, but the totally collectivized command economy was never going to work.