Forbes
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
Texas Congressman Dr. Ron Paul wants to see if the valuations of the Federal Reserve’s transactions were fair.
Steve Forbes: What precisely will your bill on auditing the Fed do and not do? Let’s just clear that up.
Paul: As a matter of fact, it’s a pretty weak bill when you think about it.
Forbes: It seems pretty mild.
Paul: But from their viewpoint it is horrendous because we know what
they’ve been doing. You know? And they don’t want us to
know what they’ve been doing. The big argument has always been
they don’t want transparency because they’ll lose their
independence. And independence means secrecy. If they lose their
secrecy then the people and the Congress won’t know what
they’ve been doing. Who gets bailed out at what price? … I
put an explicit statement in there that we have no intention of
monitoring monetary policy even though I have different views. But, you
know, when you think of it, Bernie Sanders was a cosponsor in the
Senate. He and I don’t see eye to eye on the market. But we see
eye to eye on transparency. So we wouldn’t agree on monetary
policy, but we agreed on this bill. But in order to clarify that
Bernanke would say, “Well what we don’t need is Congress
coming in the day after we have a FOMC meeting and finding out who said
what and why because everybody would be hesitant.” And one of the
arguments is, “If Congress had anything to do with this,
they’d keep interest rates too low too long.”
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