Just like the Bank of England, the U.S. Fed seems to have Britney-sized ‘issues’ with its core stock in trade, money itself.

Professor Tim Besley, one of the nine people chosen to set interest-rate policy at the Bank of England in London, gave a speech on Tuesday about “Inflation and the Global Economy.”

For a central banker talking about commodity prices and the cost of living, he managed a remarkable feat.

He didn’t use the word “money” once.

Nor did his BoE colleague Charles Bean when he spoke about the “prospects for the U.K. economy” on 17th April.

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Nor did the deputy governor, John Gieve, when he spoke on “global imbalances” at the Sovereign Wealth Fund conference in London last month.

In fact, if you ignore the phrase “money market(s),” seven different members of the Bank’s policy team used the word “money” just three times in nine speeches over the last 10 weeks.

Their chosen topics included “policy dilemmas,” “the return of the credit cycle,” and even — on Wednesday this week — “Sterling and monetary policy.” But of money itself, the very thing the Old Lady issues? It got three name-checks only.

The Federal Reserve seems to have Britney-sized “issues” with its core stock-in-trade, too. Issues verging on the neurotic, in fact. Allowing for one bizarre exception (in which Fred Mishkin claimed that the Dollar’s forex collapse won’t create any Main Street inflation), some 23 speeches from five Fed policy-makers since mid-February mentioned “money” a total of only eight times. Four of those mentions came in the phrase “money market(s).”

And this from a team charged with providing a “flexible currency” — meaning money, of course — to the citizens of the United States. So why hide from the issue? Is the Fed scared of naming its very purpose? It can’t surely fear a pile of paper, can it?

The Fed’s Open Market Committee wields so much power, according to Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, it should be classed the “fourth branch of government.” Forget about Congress, the White House, the courts; the Fed holds “more power over your daily life than your congressman and senator, maybe even your president,” Reich writes in his blog.

In short, the Federal Reserve “can do amazing things…” according to Reich, but from our review of Fed speeches, it can’t talk about money. Things like:

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“Decide one big bank, JP Morgan, is going to take over another, Bear Stearns, backed by $29 billion of taxpayer money…

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“Expose taxpayers to hundreds of billions of dollars of potential losses without a single appropriation hearing, as it did when it allowed Wall Street’s major investment banks to exchange tainted mortgage-backed securities for nice clean loans from the Treasury…

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“Deciding the threat of recession is bigger than inflation, so it’s been lowering interest rates.”

This last super-heroic ability, notes Reich — now professor of public policy at Berkeley — “has made the Dollar drop further and faster, which means you’re paying more for gas and food.

“Can you imagine if Congress caused this to happen?”

A cynic might add that Congress does plenty to depress the value of dollars as well. But if you can’t guess what would happen in Washington if Congress set out to destroy the currency, the Fed most likely can. It simply needs to turn history upside down for a moment.

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At the start of the 1980s, former chairman Paul Volcker was burnt in effigy by an angry crowd on the steps of the Capitol for hiking short-term interest rates to 19 percent. His policies aimed to quell inflation, of course, defending the value of dollars. Looking at Ben Bernanke’s decisions today, you may wonder if he intends precisely the opposite.

Volcker’s infamous weekend announcement of sharp hikes in the cost of money — and therefore in its future discounted value — was a huge political gamble. Already sliding into recession, could the U.S. bear such a high cost of borrowing? To judge just what was at stake, ask if America could bear it today.

So to hold America’s nose and get his strong medicine down, Volcker made plain he was in fact looking to target not growth but “money” — meaning the quantity of credit and cash flowing through the economy. He was simply following the monetarist tactics of the German and Swiss central banks, stemming the flood of cheap credit and reducing the excess piled up during the 1970s.

As the value of each remaining dollar bill stopped falling, the cost of living would ease off. And at first, it worked like a charm.

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