Abdication of responsibility mothered by political poltroonery, thy name is Congress. Emblematic is the congressional delegation of staggering authority over the nation's monetary and economic policy to the 7-member independent Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The open-ended delegation is indistinguishable from a law entrusting the Director of the Internal Revenue Service to promulgate an income tax code that is fair, promotes economic growth, and raises revenue sufficient to balance the budget.
The Fed was conceived in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act, dedicated to the proposition that rule by omniscient Platonic Guardians was preferable to a republican form of government. It was initially tasked by Congress to create an elastic money supply to accommodate changing seasonal needs for currency. But via congressional amendments to the 1913 Act, the Fed has grown from a modest acorn into a towering oak. Congress has delegated to the Fed responsibility for "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long term interest rates." But the Fed's outlandish interpretation of the amendments is reminiscent of airbrush artistry. In a 2007 address, Frederic S. Michkin, then member of the Board of Governors, preached that the Fed's ultimate statutory purpose was "social welfare," for example, diminishing "human misery," including poverty, the incidence of divorce, suicide, violent crime, and "loss of self-esteem." The multiple purposes thrust upon the Fed by Congress authorizes the concoction of a monetary recipe for any social ill it discerns. To borrow from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "Now in the name of all the Gods at once, upon what meat doth this our Federal Reserve Board feed that it has grown so great?" The answer: monumental unconstitutional congressional abdication of legislative power.
Article I vests all "legislative" power granted by the Constitution in the House and Senate. Article I, section 8, clause 5 empowers Congress, "To coin Money" [and] "regulate the Value thereof." Nowhere does the Constitution's text support congressional abdication of its responsibilities to circumvent accountability to the people--the signature of government by the consent of the governed. Yet Congress has crowned the Fed with plenary authority to print money and to cheapen the currency. QE1 (quantitative easing) entailed the Fed's printing $1.7 trillion to purchase toxic mortgage-backed securities from faltering banks. That sum is 50% of the annual budget of the United States. QE2 will occasion the printing of an additional $600 billion to purchase treasury securities from banks, further inflating the money supply. Tomorrow, the Fed could announce QE3, mandating the printing of $3-4 trillion more to buy treasury bonds in a quixotic quest to depress unemployment. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of any QE decision that would overstep the Fed's congressional deputation. But unchecked power is not the rule of law, but the rule of men condemned by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison more than two centuries ago.
As a bow to the modern bureaucratic Leviathan, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the delegation of legislative power to "expert" agencies. But the Court has insisted that Congress also enact an intelligible principle to delimit the legislative choices available to presidentially appointed experts and passing the buck for major policy to unelected officials. In Yakus v. United States (1944), the Court elaborated that to pass constitutional muster a delegation must be "sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts and the public" to ascertain whether the expert agency is acting within the law. More recently, the Supreme Court added in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations (2001) that, "we repeatedly have said that when Congress confers decisionmaking authority upon agencies Congress must 'lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [act] is directed to conform.'" The Federal Reserve Act, as amended by Humphrey-Hawkins in 1978, does no such thing. Whatever monetary policy is decided by the Fed fits within the congressional delegation.
The financial fallout for individuals and companies is too important to be left to an unaccountable and secret economic Tzar. QE2, for instance, will drive interest rates to zero or less and penalize tens of millions of savers while shrinking the pool of savings available for lending to business. It will cheapen the currency, make hundreds of billions of dollars of exports more attractive, and make one trillion dollars of imports more expensive. These are cornerstone economic choices that the Constitution intended Members of Congress to make and thus risk losing their jobs for error or folly. To borrow from philosopher Sam Johnson, the knowledge that a Member may be ousted at the next election concentrates his mind wonderfully on mastering his legislative subject and making prudent decisions. In contrast, when was the last time a member of the Fed's Board of Governors lost his or her job for economic witlessness?
Congressman Mike Pence (R. Ind.) and Senator Bob Coker (R. Tenn.) have voiced a desire to rewrite the congressional delegation to the Fed. They would confine it to an intelligible mission of price stability. But President Obama would likely veto the bill, even if it passed a Democratic Senate. At present, the superior course is to challenge the constitutionality of the current delegation to the Fed in a suit brought by frugal savers who are being injured by the Fed's prodigality.
The Fed is the one actor in the mix that is free to act at this point. Sure, QE will not be a majic bullet, but its about the only bullet left now that the deficit chicken hawks have come home to roost (where were they during the Bush Admin.'s balloning of the deficit?) to push their nonsense on the country. And nonsense is what it is. The US has never been able to borrow money more cheaply than it can right now, and another round of fiscal stimulus would be the most effective means of growing the economy out of the rediculously high rate of unemployment that we have now, which would avoid the mammoth loss in human capital that we are now at risk for (people lose skills as they remain unemplyoed for extended periods) and the cost of forgone productivity we are now paying because the economy is at less than full capacity. Those costs will make us **permanently** poorer as a country, shifting the growth curve downward for all future periods.
At the same time, Congress is deadlocked by the same idiots pushing the deficit chickenhawk line. Arguing that Congress ought to be controlling the Fed right now, whatever philosphical issues you may have with that from an academic POV, is simply INSANE.
Bernanke Knew Back in 1988 That Quantitative Easing Doesn't Work
Two economists, Seth B. Carpenter and Selva Demiralp, recently posted a discussion paper on the Federal Reserve Board’s website, titled “Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?”
[The study states:] “In the absence of a multiplier, open market operations, which simply change reserve balances, do not directly affect lending behavior at the aggregate level. Put differently, if the quantity of reserves is relevant for the transmission of monetary policy, a different mechanism must be found. The argument against the textbook money multiplier is not new. For example, Bernanke and Blinder (1988) and Kashyap and Stein (1995) note that the bank lending channel is not operative if banks have access to external sources of funding. The appendix illustrates these relationships with a simple model. This paper provides institutional and empirical evidence that the money multiplier and the associated narrow bank lending channel are not relevant for analyzing the United States.”
Did you catch that? Bernanke knew back in 1988 that quantitative easing doesn’t work.
It says that Seth B. Carpenter and Selva Demiralp, who interpret Bernake's work in reaching THEIR conclusions, not Bernake's, think that Q.E. doesn't work.
If you actually read what Bernake's written about optimal policy in a liquidity trap, such as the one we are in (and he's written quite a bit on it, especially in analysing Japan's liquidity trap recession of the 1990s), he RECOMMENDS Q.E.
The easiest way to think about US Treasury bonds is as a sponge to soak up cash in the market. The more bonds, the bigger the sponge, the more cash held out of the system, the more cash out of the system the less demand for real goods and services. By issuing 10 year bonds and having the Fed buy them, the result is just like issuing 1 month notes because Fed reserves look like 1 month (or 3 month) paper. Seems like a lot of work to issue $600 million of 1 month notes (okay so you would have to issue them for the next 120 months assuming the Fed holds the bonds to maturity).
Continue Reading at: http://www.abodia.com/irs/Articles/Federal%20Reserve%20is%20not%20US%20Government.htm
U.S. officials including Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in a joint statement called the new standards a "significant step forward in reducing the incidence and severity of future financial crises.
Under current rules banks have to hold back at least 4 percent of their balance sheet to cover their risks. Starting in 2013, this reserve. Risks, ie loans, 4% means must hold 4 cents for each dollar they loan, which means 96 cents is not in their position you are borrowing it into existence and paying interest on the dollar when they only had 4 cents at the time. The system is a fraud by any logic, loan money you don't have and charge interest, not simple interest but compound interest over many years.