That’s the title of Ian Talley’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal online edition. The question arises from the People’s Republic of China’s open manipulation of its currency through its control of the yuan’s exchange rate in the currency markets. The PRC executes this manipulation by limiting the range of values within which the yuan is permitted to trade in those markets.

The question gains currency (sorry) as Congress contemplates adding an anti-currency manipulation clause to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact or to the fast track trade bull currently in progress of a sort. But that’s currency manipulation from the other side of the matter: instead of a country manipulating its own currency, this clause says the currency must be manipulated according to our imperatives:

Some US lawmakers are channeling their constituents’ long-held grievances by pressing to incorporate enforceable currency provisions….

The problem from this side of the coin (sorry, again) centers on the determination of what is a “fair” value for a nation’s currency, who gets to make that determination, and on what grounds. The point of Talley’s article concerns the difficulty of making those determinations.

It’s really quite simple, though. There are only two ways to determine the value of a currency. One is that a currency is worth what the nation’s government says it’s worth. (This, incidentally, blows up the gold bug argument that the US should go back to a gold standard for the dollar, that being the only way to bring stability to our currency. But the gold would have the value our government says it has, and nothing else, as FDR demonstrated when he devalued the dollar against gold in the ’30s.)

The other way, the free market (and so most moral) way, is this: let the currency float; its value is what the market says it is, empirically, by what the participants in that free market—free men and woman, acting voluntarily according to their own wants and needs—are willing to exchange currency for.

The Fed has been actively suppressing interest rates, keeping them near zero, for a long time. This is in addition to the Obama administration’s economic policies, and the two attitudes have combined to produce an economic recovery from the Panic of 2008 that is one in name only. See this graph, adapted from one in a recent Wall Street Journal to see just how bad the current “recovery” is. The numbers other than the two first quarter 2015 are average annualized rates of increase.

Certainly, the Obama policies need to be corrected, but here’s something the Fed can do all by itself: it could let interest rates float, and see them rise to market rates, probably with a temporary overshoot, given the duration of its suppression and separate money printing, but that’s only going to get worse as the Fed delays correcting its own error.

With interest at their more normal level, banks would be more willing to lend, and without lowering their credit standards; businesses would be more willing to borrow, since even though they’d be paying more for their debt, they’d recognize the positive economic indicator; and folks dependent on fixed income sources for their living—widows and orphans—would have more money to spend, even if only on necessities, which would help make that positive economic indicator more concrete.

Fed governor Jerome Powell, in remarks prepared for a conference of community bankers in New York, said banks under a certain asset level, “perhaps $10 billion,” should be exempt from Dodd-Frank compensation restrictions. The restrictions, which are being developed by the Fed and other agencies, are designed to remove encouragements for bankers to take excessive risk.

Couple things about this. Why $10 billion? Why not $20 billion? Why not $5 billion? Based on what logic is this limit chosen? Based on what logic is any limit chosen? How is “system risk” from bank failure, the putative rationale for Dodd-Frank at all, a lesser risk than government’s intervention into the market place?

The other thing is “excessive risk.” Based on what criteria? What constitutes “excessive?” Under what circumstance is risk excessive here, but not there? What about government’s excessive risk from the bailouts and “stimulus” package of the 2008-2009 period; risks from which our economy still has not recovered?

How is government—politicians and bureaucrats—better qualified to determine what is excessive than the businessmen and shareholders and investors involved? How are those politicians’ and bureaucrats’ solutions to actual business failure and economic dislocation better than the folks involved—including in the aggregate, the collected citizenry? We still haven’t recovered from those government men’s last set of solutions.