The Wrongologist

Well, it should be no surprise that the Federal Reserve is already audited, but Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) re-introduced an “Audit the Fed” bill in the House on Wednesday, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced companion legislation in the US Senate. This has been a pet idea of Republicans for years. The GOP’s reasoning was summed up by Rep. Massie:

Behind closed doors, the Fed crafts monetary policy that will continue to devalue our currency, slow economic growth, and make life harder for the poor and middle class…

Mr. Massie apparently does not know that the US dollar is among the strongest currencies in international markets. Otherwise, he wouldn’t say that the Fed is debasing our currency. This guy is the exact reason why Congress’ role in directing the Fed should not be enlarged. Some suggest the bill is inaccurately named, but as the WSJ says:

Fed officials meet several times a year to decide what to do with short-term interest rates and how to influence them—actions that affect the borrowing costs of households, businesses and investors across the country. The “Audit the Fed” measures would require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine those decisions.

And then report their findings to various Congressional committees. The GAO already has some Fed oversight, but the bill would repeal restrictions on their oversight. The most important restriction blocks the GAO from reviewing:

Deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, [as well as] discussion or communication among or between members of the Board and officers and employees related to such deliberations.

The repeal of these existing restrictions would allow the GAO to view all materials and transcripts related to meetings of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the entity that sets US interest rates. It would require the GAO, at the request of Congress, to provide recommendations on monetary policy, including the FOMC’s interest-rate decisions, to Congress.

This would make meeting-by-meeting monetary policy decisions subject to Congressional review and, potentially, Congressional pressure. Judging by Mr. Massie’s level of knowledge about central banking, it would be highly likely that political pressure and rabble-rousing would be unavoidable.

The Fed’s financial statements are already audited in the usual sense by the government’s Inspector General (IG) and by Deloitte, a world-class independent accounting firm. The resulting financial reports are available to the public online. Every security owned by the Fed, including its unique identifying CUSIP number, is also available online.

The GAO reviews the Fed’s activities at the request of Congress, and has wide latitude to review Fed operations. For example, the Dodd-Frank Act required the GAO to conduct reviews of the Fed’s emergency lending programs during the 2008 crisis, along with the Fed’s governance structure.  Since the financial crisis, the GAO has done some 70 reviews of aspects of Fed operations. That’s about 10 reviews a year since the end of the crisis.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who joined with Sen. Paul to introduce the “Audit the Fed” legislation in the Senate, speaks for many of the Right Wing political class when he says, “the Fed is a group of unaccountable, unelected philosopher kings making decisions that affect every American”.

The bill’s proponents argue that “transparency” is lacking, and this will be cured with more Congressional oversight. Or, by more finger-pointing by certain gerrymandered GOP lifers talking about how the FOMC decisions are based on incorrect assumptions and broken models. There will probably be about as much value-added oversight as the various Benghazi committees exercised over the State Department.

In 2017 we’re having the same debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank that America had in the early 1900s prior to the Federal Reserve Act’s passage in 1913. We still hear voices calling for either more or less restrictive monetary policy, for more or less regulation, and even for the Fed to be abolished.

These are the same issues that Sen. Nelson Aldrich, banker Paul Warburg and their colleagues debated a hundred years ago. Back then, the debate was highly politicized, since there was widespread populist mistrust of Wall Street and of the concept of a centralized federal banking authority. Sound familiar?

So, time to let the GOP politicize the Fed. Time to let the Congress get its hands on monetary policy, even though they have proven to have zero ability to handle fiscal policy. Consider Congress’s failure to pass budgets, and their willingness to let the US government default on its debt.

Shouldn’t we keep the Fed’s deliberations free from grandstanding politicians playing to a conspiracy hungry constituency?

Isn’t this supposed to be the Congress that believed in less government?