Federal Reserve in "Deep Panic" Over Audit the Fed

And they should be…

Christopher Goins, writing at The American Spectator, writes about Dallas Federal Reserve Chair Richard Powell’s recent speech at Catholic University and the Fed’s campaign against Audit the Fed.

Goins quotes yours truly on the Fed’s arguments:

If you look at the language of the bill there is nothing in there that gives Congress any new authority over monetary policy,” said Norman Kirk Singleton, vice president of policy for Campaign for Liberty, who attended Powell’s lecture. “It just says there will be transparency. And the Fed’s independent decision-making is actually protected by time…it’s not like a real-time audit.”

That means no TVs in the Fed’s boardroom.

Singleton added that many supporters of the bill, which now has 31 cosponsors in the Senate, explicitly reject the idea of abolishing the Fed.

Additionally, critics such as Heritage Foundation’s Norbert Michel point out that the Fed’s freedom from political pressure is straight hooey, as it has enjoyed a close relationship with the U.S. Treasury in the era of Ben Bernanke. What kind of “independence” from politics is that?

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s director of he Office for Budget and Management, believes that the exact opposite is true, that the Fed has been all too willing to throw its weight around on Capitol Hill. In a recent column, he characterizes Bernanke’s lobbying of Congress in the wake of the financial crisis this way: “Indeed, it was Bernanke and his Wall Street sidekick, Hank Paulson, who went up to Capitol Hill and put a gun to their heads. It was these demagogues who scared the ‘politicians’ witless with a phony alarm that Great Depression 2.0 was just around the corner unless the Fed opened the monetary spigots, and Congress added $700 billion of TARP on top.”

Read the whole thing here.

Make sure the Senate Banking Committee listens to you, not Fisher, Yellen and the rest of the Fed’s apologists by signing the Bring it to the Floor petition.