There are more important things than whether the next Federal Reserve chairman will be a man or a woman.
AS SUMMER BECOMES fall, we commence the 100th anniversary of that most glorious of all the violations of the United States Constitution, the Federal Reserve. The legislation that eventually emerged as the Federal Reserve Act was introduced in the House in August 1913 and was enacted and signed in December. The Fed itself started doing business in 1914. It would seem that this is a dandy time to pause in our national rush to ruin so as to reflect on what the first century of the Fed has wrought.
The chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, Representative Kevin Brady, has been nursing a bill to create a Centennial Monetary Commission. The idea would be to look at all the questions related to how the Federal Reserve System has, or has not, worked. The Texas Republican is a cheerful, sensible, moderate fellow who has put out word that he wants the commission to be “brutally bipartisan.” Wouldn’t you know but that the Commission is given but a 14 percent chance of getting out of Brady’s own committee and a 2 percent chance of becoming law.
Instead, the press has been chasing the question of whether the next chairman of the Fed ought to be a woman. The New York Timesassigned two reporters to write a story called “In Tug of War Over New Fed Leader, Some Gender Undertones.” They disclosed that the pro-woman camp was for the vice chairman of the Fed, Janet Yellen, while the pro-man camp was for a former treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers. This led the New York Sun to issue a bemused editorial called “The Female Dollar.”
So how is the nation that Reagan likened to a shining city on a hill going to get at the various issues surrounding the Fed? Particularly now that the Fed’s craftiest congressional critic, Ron Paul, has left Congress? The Texas libertarian-Republican had been nursing a measure to require an audit of the Fed, one that would look not only at its holdings but also at how it does business, including internationally. The bill actually passed the House on a bipartisan vote. But it died in that graveyard of reform, the Senate, where Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul, is trying to carry on his dad’s effort.
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