Over the last century, the Federal Reserve has compiled an astonishingly poor performance record.

Starting in 1929, as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously documented, the Fed’s disastrous monetary policy decisions turned what likely would have been a short recession into the Great Depression.

In the 1970s, its mishandling of monetary policy gave us the Great Inflation that reached well into double digits. Its recent monetary policy mistakes caused inflation to spike from 1.4 percent in January 2021, to 9.1 percent in June 2022, and to this day remain above the Fed’s 2 percent target for rising prices.

Beyond monetary policy, the Fed’s misguided bank supervision resulted in the costly 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

The Fed annually stress tests the nation’s biggest banks. Here’s a better idea: As Jon Decker suggests, “Maybe Its Time We ‘Stress Test’ the Fed?”