
The Federal Reserve Needs New Thinking - roymurdock
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-federal-reserve-needs-new-thinking-1472076212
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rskar
The "too-long-didn't-read": A Governor on the Federal Reserve Board (Kevin
Warsh), is motivated to write this by this week's gathering at Jackson Hole,
Wyo., where "the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosts the world’s leading
central bankers and academics to consider monetary reform." In it he mostly
decries the application of old/current methods directed at raising inflation,
in a strategy that is in accordance with the "groupthink within the academic
economics guild". He then says via the Dodd-Frank Act the Fed "now
micromanages big banks and effectively caps their rate of return."

His essay doesn't convey even the smallest hint of what any alternatives may
resemble - only a platitude is offered: "The guild tightens its grip when it
should open its mind to new data sources, new analytics, new economic models,
new communication strategies, and a new paradigm for policy."

The one clear idea is how "in bed" the Fed is with the financial industry:

(1) "[The Fed] appears in thrall to financial markets, and financial markets
are in thrall to the Fed..."

(2) "A new inflation target ... would please the denizens of Wall Street who
pine for still-looser Fed policy."

(3) "From the beginning of 2008 to the present, more than half of the increase
in the value of the S&P 500 occurred on the day of Federal Open Market
Committee decisions."

(4) "Long after the financial crisis, the Fed holds trillions of dollars of
assets that would otherwise be in private hands."

(5) "...[I]ts compulsion to keep asset prices elevated..."

In the end, though, the only message that comes loud and clear is "inflation
bad", but no mention of the apparent worldwide deflation that brought on the
very idea of encouraging inflation per the "groupthink".

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cpr
What many people don't realize is that the Federal Reserve Banks are private,
for-profit banks, with only very tenuous oversight by Congress.

It's a very strange set-up and I think high time for a serious audit of what
they've been doing for decades.

For example, though Congress authorized $600B of bank bail-out money during
the 2008 crisis, the Fed actually extended $6T to domestic and (many) foreign
banks.

It's clear the whole notion of privately-controlled "central banks" is a very
dubious one, with profits lining a few people's pockets, all the while
exerting a huge influence over a whole country's economy.

~~~
milcron
The Fed is already rather audited... from Bernanke's blog:

    
    
        The Fed is already thoroughly audited in the usual sense, by an independent
        inspector general and by an outside accounting firm (currently, Deloitte and
        Touche), and the resulting financial reports are made public online. Every
        security owned by the Fed, up to the detail of the identifying CUSIP number, is
        also available online.  Moreover, the Government Accountability Office (GAO),
        which does in-depth reviews and analyses (“audits” of a different type) of
        government activities at the request of Congress, has wide latitude to review
        Fed operations, including supervision and regulation as well as other functions.
        For example, as required by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the GAO conducted
        reviews of the Fed’s emergency lending programs during the crisis and of the
        Fed’s governance structure.  Since the financial crisis, the GAO has done some
        70 reviews of aspects of Fed operations.
    

What other sorts of auditing do you want?

It's also worth mentioning that the US Fed acts as central bank to the world
-- US taxpayers are not on the hook for that $6T.

