Washington's Blog

Saturday, May 8, 2010
The Fed Is Only Authorized to Conduct MONETARY Policy, But It Has Also "Become the Single Largest FISCAL Actor in the U.S. Economy"




On Tuesday, I wrote:


The Fed argues that an audit would interfere with its monetary policy decisions. [But] decisions about what toxic assets should be accepted by the Fed as collateral, how such assets should be valued, and who bailout funds should be given to are wholly separate from the Fed's core monetary policy decision: raising or lowering interest rates.

[F]unneling hundreds of billions to foreign nations and foreign banks, accepting worthless junk from the too big to fails and marking it at unrealistic valuations, and doing the other things which the Fed has been doing recently are not core monetary functions. Congress never authorized these actions when they passed the Federal Reserve Act.

Therefore, the Fed's actions must be made transparent and subject to the light of day.

Eliot Spitzer wrote an important essay yesterday explaining that what the Fed is really doing is controlling our country's fiscal - as well as monetary - policy:


The Fed over the course of this crisis has demonstrated that its influence goes far beyond the issue of monetary policy.

In monetary policy—controlling the supply of money—the Fed is constrained by reasonably well-understood policy levers that have a macro impact, and its decisions are rather evident in short order. Now, in contrast, the Fed is engaging in fiscal policy—spending money—and in fact has become the single largest fiscal actor in the U.S. economy, dispensing hundreds of billions of dollars to private parties. In doing so, the Fed is picking winners and losers. Why Goldman but not Lehman? Why guarantee the debt of some companies but not others?

The Fed has enormous discretion in its decisions. It is entirely appropriate to demand that they be carried out with greater transparency and be subject to greater oversight.