In the debate just concluded with friend and co-blogger Daniel Hemel, I mentioned that the constitutional issues around Fed governance—and there are serious questions, Daniel and I both agree—can obscure the policy issue around Fed governance. The Constitution provides here a minimum, not a maximum. As I mention in my book, the constitutional remedies do […]
In my last post, I wrote about whether the Reserve Bank presidents were more like the CEO of the Girl Scouts or Warren Buffett on the one hand, or officers of the United States exercising significant government authority on the other. I think the answer is the latter, especially in light of how much authority […]
My many thanks again to Chris Walker, the Journal editors, and the many contributors for a very stimulating symposium on my book, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. I wanted to write today (and, because these issues end up taking so much space to unpack, in a subsequent post as well) to push […]
What a pleasure it has been to read these reviews. As I set out to write The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , this very audience—serious scholars and practitioners of administrative law who had thought hard about institutional design in other contexts besides the Fed—weighed heavily as one of the primary groups of […]
Most of official Washington is focused on the vacancy at the Supreme Court, but for watchers of financial regulation and central banking a new vacancy is surely more important: Thomas Baxter, the long-time general counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has announced his retirement. He’s a New York Fed lifer—his retirement comes at […]
After more than six years of work, my book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve was recently published by Princeton University Press. I’ll be blogging on its content in the weeks ahead, so I won’t pregame those posts here. Instead, I wanted to discuss a topic that might be of interest to some […]
The Business History Review has a new article that should interest our readers. In Citibank, Credit Cards, and the Local Politics of National Consumer Finance, 1968-1991, Sean Vanatta (PhD candidate in history at Princeton) tells us the story of how Sioux Falls, South Dakota became a global financial center in 1981. Well, global financial center […]
Anyone who has done research on the U.S. Federal Reserve System and who has ventured into an old-fashioned library will notice something remarkable: the shelves in the HG 2500 section of the library veritably groan under the weight of conspiratorial tomes. These range from the absurd (about international cabals that control the Fed and the […]
I attended a conference last weekend in New York, hosted by Bob Hockett and Saule Omarova at Cornell Law School. It was an uncommonly good one, one of the best I have attended. The quality made me wonder what was so good about it, so I share some thoughts here that might be of interest. […]
I’ve been enjoying my co-blogger Aaron Nielson’s review of the DC Circuit’s cases. Perhaps some of this pleasure comes from my memories of clerking there, for the great Stephen F. Williams, the intellectual godfather of many an academic’s career—it’s a uniquely interesting place to clerk, with cases that can be at the core of some […]
It may be the case that legal academics in the U.S. are no longer rewarded for writing treatises. Fortunately for us, the same standard appears not to apply to our British counterparts. Rosa M. Lastra, one of the leading experts on central banks and a pioneer in central banking law, has written the second edition […]
As the Chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) is one of the most important figures in Washington and Wall Street. Among his targets is reforming the Fed, including the Fed’s governance. Recently, Senator Shelby has announced that he has a bone to pick with the Obama Administration on this score. […]
Pardon my long hiatus from blogging. The reason was a move, from Princeton, NJ where I was working (and will continue to work) on my PhD in financial history, to Philadelphia, PA, where I am now an assistant professor at Wharton/Penn, teaching in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department (those who follow any aspect […]
I’ve been very much enjoying Philip’s posts—I hope they have convinced our readers to buy his book and take his arguments seriously. One place where Philip helpfully sharpens our different views of law and the financial crisis is on the Fed’s controversial decision not to extend emergency lending to Lehman Brothers sufficient to stave off the […]
It’s my pleasure to introduce guest blogger Philip Wallach, a Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Philip is the rather rare political scientist who doesn’t take an extreme view of law, neither as politics by another means nor as a black box of binding but indiscernible rules. He is the author of an […]