The Problem With the Fed Isn’t Independence, It’s Accountability
Monetary policy is too technical to be left to the politicians and too political to be left to the technocrats.
Eight times a year, an unelected group of economists and bankers files into the boardroom of the Marriner S. Eccles building in Washington, where the Federal Reserve has its headquarters. Maybe they fiddle with your mortgage rate. Maybe they decide to buy or sell hundreds of billions of dollars of government debt. If it’s a crisis, maybe they decide who gets a bailout and who doesn’t.
If they get it right, inflation stays low, employment stays high, and we are expected to celebrate their wise and benevolent stewardship of the economy. If they get it wrong, as they have many times, inflation might soar, or unemployment might rocket higher, but we’re expected to understand they’re merely human, neither all-seeing nor all-powerful.