OUR VIEW

Oh my! Here's our view. We hope you know yours.

Any idea that the Federal Reserve Bank is or ever was, as one apparent conservative website,The Fiscal Times, recently reported, "fiercely independent" is laughable. Fiercely independent central banks are like silent thunder; they don't really go together.

Independent of whom and what? We disdain regulation as much as the next guy, but every time someone questions the Fed's so-called transparency, a term the Fed itself loves to toss around to brag how open-ended it is, these apologists roll out their same old, shopworn, carping rhetoric.

thefiscaltimes.com/2015/11/19/House-GOP-Trying-Cripple-Fed-Policy-Making

We are no friend of the GOP. In fact, both parties are like Mike and Ike--pitiful and pathetic.Take your pick. All one really needs to know about this article is the author spent 25 years at the Washington Post.

The House Republicans’ solution to the problem is a complex bill dubbed the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act (FORM) – a measure likely to pass the House today that Yellen warns would be a “grave mistake” that could seriously harm the economy and once again drive up unemployment.

To begin with, anything Fed Chair Yellen warns "would be a grave mistake," is worth considering implementing. The biggest grave mistake is having a Federal Reserve in the first place. Congress passes complex bills every year. Most of them are so complex, to paraphrase a Pelosi line, nobody reads them before or after they're passed.

That's what we love about Washington--their bipartisan consistency.

“The bill would severely impair the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry out its congressional mandate and would be a grave mistake, detrimental to the economy and the American people,” she said in a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

The only real thing detrimental to the economy and the American people has been the Fed. And it started way back in 1913, the same year the then ensconced privileged set birthed another disaster, the IRS. Talk about complex bills. Rumor has it someone has pledged ten million dollars tax free to any man or woman or illegal alien, jihadists excepted, who can prove he or she or them has read every word.

Among other things, the GOP bill that emerged from the Financial Services Committee last week on a straight party-line vote, would require the Fed to be more “transparent” about the stress tests it requires the nation’s largest banks to pass each year. It would require Fed employees to abide by the same ethical requirements as other federal financial regulators. And it would place new restrictions on the Fed’s ability to make emergency loans during periods of financial crisis.

Now there's a novel twist, hold Fed employees' feet to the same ethical flame as other federal financial regulators. Oh my! And damn those straight-party line votes. If one was only semi-literate, which most of are according to Washington, this author would have readers believe the GOP has cornered the market on them.

They key condescension here is requiring the Fed to let we semi-illiterates in on the secret ingredients of those big bank stress tests. Oh my!