What has the Federal Reserve done for you lately?

OPINION:

Washington is fighting over who runs the Federal Reserve. Nobody is asking what the Federal Reserve has done to every American who has ever trusted it with the value of their money.

Sometime in the vicinity of 3000 B.C., an Egyptian grain merchant made a decision that changed the course of human history. He wrote a number on a piece of reed paper and handed it to someone in exchange for actual grain. The note was not the grain, but it traveled as if it were.

That gap between the claim and the thing being claimed is the oldest maneuver in commerce. Every monetary innovation since has been a refinement of it.

It could be a receipt from a goldsmith, a banknote or the digital balance in your brokerage account. Or, in our present focus, the Federal Reserve note. Each step takes us further away from the grain, adding another layer of trust between the holder and the commodity.

On or around May 15, Kevin Warsh will be sworn in as the 14th chair of the Federal Reserve. Washington typically calls it a transition: One chair exits, another enters, and the institution continues.

What continues is the problem.

In every case, the people given custody of the claims have ultimately printed more of them on paper than the things behind them could support. Washington is debating who says the words and holds the pen, but nobody is asking what has been written with that pen for the past 113 years.

The circumstances of Mr. Warsh’s arrival are, by any honest accounting, extraordinary. His predecessor, Jerome Powell, has announced that he will remain on the Fed’s Board of Governors after his term as chair ends. He is the first outgoing chair to do so since 1948.

Mr. Powell cited what he called “unprecedented legal attacks” on the institution, including a criminal investigation into his conduct launched by the administration now installing his replacement.

The Senate Banking Committee advanced Mr. Warsh’s nomination on a 13-11 party-line vote — the most partisan confirmation of a Fed chair nominee in the committee’s history.

Yet these are not the facts that matter most.

Republicans are voting for Mr. Warsh. Democrats are calling him a sock puppet. When the gavel falls and the oath is taken, hardly any senator on either side of that 13-11 line will have asked the question that matters: What has the Federal Reserve done to the purchasing power of every American who has trusted it — through every chair, every party, every crisis — since 1913?

Neither Mr. Powell, Mr. Warsh nor any senator on either side of that 13-11 vote will say it plainly: The Federal Reserve has watered down the dollar by approximately 87% since 1971, when the U.S. severed the last formal connection between its gold-backed currency and anything real.

That is not a political accusation; it is plain arithmetic. The dollar that your grandparents earned, saved and trusted has been reduced by the institution that Mr. Powell and Mr. Warsh have served to 13 cents of its former worth.

The Egyptian grain merchant at least promised and gave you grain. The Federal Reserve gave you a promissory note and then quietly broke that promise by reducing the note’s value, while the people closest to the money supply collected the difference.

This is not a problem that changes with the chair. Arthur Burns, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke all watered down the dollar. So did Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell.

Kevin Warsh will inherit an institution architecturally designed to keep watering it down, regardless of who asks him to do it or which party they belong to.

The fight over Fed independence misses the point entirely. The question is not whether the Federal Reserve should be independent of the president but rather whether it has ever been accountable to the people whose savings it manages.

The 113-year record answers that question without ambiguity.

That first paper/grain contract is long gone, but the gap between what your money says it is worth and its real value grows wider with every transition, every confirmation hearing and every reassurance that the next chair will be different.

From papyrus to Powell, the trick has never changed. Only the paper has.

• Christopher Walker worked in the machinery manufacturing industry for more than 35 years. He published “Caught in the Act” on Truthout and Substack. He lives in Overland Park, Kansas.