I’ve written about the relatively new problem of chronic Fed vacancies before (see here), but we’re setting new records. With the just-announced resignation of Vice Chair Stanley Fischer 18 months before his leadership term expired, we face another potential milestone: the first time in the Fed’s history that we have only three sitting Governors. I’ll […]
A few weeks ago, in those bygone days when Sean Spicer reigned in the White House pressroom and Reince Priebus was White House Chief of Staff, I wrote an op-ed called the Case for Janet Yellen. In it, I explained why Janet Yellen should be her own successor at the Fed, for a variety of […]
There’s no shortage of colorful players in the last round of health care debates. Senators battling kidney and brain cancer, the parliamentarian’s star turn, presidential surrogates and their sideshows, all preceded the ultimately fruitless (until now) effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. One of the most intriguing institutional players in the debate was the […]
Last week brought news of two major appointments at the Fed: Mark Van Der Weide, a long-time lawyer in the Fed’s supervision and regulation division, will be the new general counsel, and Randy Quarles has been nominated (and is expected to be confirmed) as the first Vice Chair for Supervision and member of the Fed’s […]
The inimitable Michael Greve hosts a stimulating conference with scholars and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic, called (appropriately) the Transatlantic Law Forum. The George Mason Law Review just published some of the essays from the 8th of these conferences, with a intellectual and substantive diversity reflected in the essays. They include Mike’s introduction, […]
I’ve reached the happy milestone of republishing my book, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, in paperback. This means a new preface, copied below. It’s long, but because I spend a lot of time in it discussing some of the themes and ideas that first found their home in these digital pages, I thought I […]
Given the tumult of the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, the public is forgiven for not realizing that the Administration is woefully understaffed. But even in the flurry of personnel announcements from first the transition team and now the Administration, on the Federal Reserve—perhaps the most powerful of governmental agencies—we have had near radio silence. Of […]
Today Senator Mitch McConnell, in an apparent reversal, launched what he described as a bipartisan inquiry into whether the Russian government sought to interfere with the US election. Given that President-elect Trump hasn’t been too fond of this theory of the election, and that Sen. McConnell forcefully defended the CIA and intelligence community while the […]
Yesterday, I discussed why the Fed’s political power is something that both it and the Trump Administration should consider in the coming confrontations that one can expect between them. Today, I want to focus on the Fed’s legal strategy by resurrecting statutorily permissible but largely discarded patterns of Fed governance that could require Trump to […]
[This post is drawn in part from a forthcoming policy brief co-authored with Simon Johnson] Last week, I said that we should not expect the Trump-Republican coalition to have the same hawkish posture toward monetary policy that we saw within the Republican coalition during its anti-Obama years from 2009-2017. There are coalitional tactics and there […]
[This blog post comes in part from a policy brief co-authored with Simon Johnson, forthcoming] Like all the other academic idiots out there who failed to see this coming, I thought Trump’s chances for victory very low. Time was, I worried that Trump’s loss in November, the Fed’s raising of rates in December would lead […]
Central bankers often insist that ideology, values, worldview, and—that much-hated term—politics play no role in influencing their decisions. This is a very useful dodge on their part. It’s a dodge because, as I have argued in my book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, expertise is inevitably and appropriately ideological, the process that […]
I don’t envy the reading load that William Domnarski undertook on his way to writing his biography of Richard Posner. By his account in an interview, he read all of Posner’s judicial opinions, numbering some 3,000. And then he read “most of them for the second time,” and “some for the third time.” He then […]
My colleague David Zaring and I are hosting a conference in April 2017 entitled, simply enough, Financial Regulation and the Rule of Law. The papers presented are a mix of invited papers and an open call, which I am pasting below. If this topic interests you, we hope you’ll submit. The Wharton School of the […]
I’m a bit late on this—my wife and I just welcomed a new baby last week, so even this little blog post is a minor miracle—but Wall Street Journal reporters Emily Glazer and Ryan Tracy have a fascinating profile of Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo, whom they rightly call in the article’s headline “The […]