Last week the 112th Congress was sworn in. I am pleased that I will
be chairing the Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the Financial Services
Committee, which has oversight of the Federal Reserve. Obviously, this
position will facilitate my efforts to ensure the Fed provides the
American people with more information about what they have been doing
with and to our money. Not surprisingly, since my chairmanship was
announced, apologists for the Fed have been recycling the old canard
about how increased transparency threatens the Fed's so-called political
independence.
By independence, they are referring to the Fed's ability to greatly
impact the economy with virtually no meaningful oversight. We only
recently learned that the bankers at the Fed were able to use the latest
financial crisis to bail out Wall Street cronies and foreign central
banks with billions of dollars that were created and wasted, instead of
appropriated and voted on by representatives of the people. The Fed and
its supporters in Congress vehemently fought even this small bit of
transparency and without this one-time provision in the financial reform
act forcing disclosure, we would still not have this information.
Indeed, we are in the dark on so much of what the Fed has done. This is
extremely dangerous for our country, yet this power and secrecy is
defended as some kind of public good, which is patently ridiculous.