So would hold Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in a case challenging the constitutionality of the institutional design of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Kavanaugh has written some of the most provocative concurring and dissenting opinions about the constitutional limits and permissions of institutional design, including […]

There was a time when the Fed Chair’s semi-annual testimony before the House or Senate was something of a love fest. Chairman Greenspan would be celebrated by members on the left and right, each side eager to latch onto the growing perception that Greenspan—and the Fed—was the best thing going in U.S. economic policy. Judging […]

The econ blogosphere is alight with the news that former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is now blogging. While I may engage the substance of his posts in this space, I want to comment on his striking choice to blog at all. In a Q&A at Brookings earlier in the month, a journalist asked Bernanke for […]

This is the second in a three-part series on Fed governance. The first is here. In the first post in this series, I discussed some of the problems I see in the governance structure of the Federal Reserve Banks. At the Brookings event where I laid out some of these arguments, my respondent was former […]

This is the first of three posts on recent developments in the governance of the Fed.  My apologies to any regular readers—who might consist only of my wife and mother—for the long break from blogging. To compensate, I’m going to write a three-post series on some recent discussions of the Fed and its governance. Today, […]

Will Baude has a thoughtful response to my somewhat grumpy take on David Lat’s very engaging novel, Supreme Ambitions. As with my other post, spoiler alert: the whole analysis and debate here reveal the book’s major plot twists. Will and I agree on a lot, but he makes two points that differ from mine: first, […]

There is a largely intramural dispute within the Democratic Party about the wisdom (or not) of appointing Antonio Weiss to a senior position at the Treasury Department. Weiss’s title would be the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance (UDF), but he would effectively occupy the third chair in the Treasury’s C-suite and thus […]

SPOILER ALERT: This post will discuss some of the late-breaking developments of David Lat’s new novel, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel Forgive the diversion from financial regulation/central banking, but I’ve read David Lat’s Supreme Ambitions , a consuming thriller about—I’m not kidding—judicial law clerks. Since I imagine our readership and Lat’s readership overlap to some extent, […]

It has been a very active couple of weeks for “Club Fed,” the group of scholars, investors, journalists and others who watch the Fed. In what may well be the Senate Democrats’ last Fed-related hurrah, we witnessed a fascinating hearing on the Fed’s supervisory authority, especially as delegated to the twelve quasi-private Federal Reserve Banks […]

The Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate has interesting implications for the Federal Reserve. Three issues come to mind: the legislative agenda, appointments, and hearings. But predicting Republican posture in the 114th Congress is a very difficult thing: it will depend entirely on which wing of the party—the populist/Tea Party wing, or the bank-friendly/establishment wing–takes control […]

Last week, I pushed against a popular account of Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street that I think misconstrues exactly what Bagehot was trying to do (and the context within which he was doing it). My brilliant live-in editor tells me that (1) Bagehot really isn’t that popular, so I may be overstating how much people have […]

We are not accustomed to thinking of central banks, in their roles as lenders of last resort, as regulators. Regulation means financial regulation, the stuff of notices and comments and final proposed rules and enforcement letters. But while central banks don’t look exactly like other regulators, it is the exercise of governmental power deposited in […]

Back in 2011, I was a guest blogger at the business law blog The Conglomerate. That summer, I wrote the following (it’s long, and I’m going to include it all: the link back to The Conglomerate is here). I repost because the ongoing AIG litigation is providing an example of what I had in mind: the conversion of […]

Neil Irwin has the details. Apparently Ben Bernanke–the man of the seven-figure book deal and somany high-profile speaking engagements that it’s difficult to make it to court–can’t refinance the mortgage on his $800,000 Washington townhouse. The problem is that he has left his long-term job that paid a moderately high salary to one where is […]

Surely Julia Pierson breathed a sigh of relief as she went to bed last night. She hadn’t won plaudits for her performance on the Hill, but the testimony was over and she could now turn to fixing the problems at the agency responsible for protecting the President. And then she opened the paper this morning […]