No Transparency for Big Banks, ‘Audit the Fed’ Bill Voted Out

Last week a vote by the Senate Democrats blocked Sen. Rand Paul’s ‘Audit the Fed’ bill. The bill, if passed, would have forced a greater transparency onto the Federal Reserve and auditing on the central bank cartel.

The bill received mass support among the Republicans; however, one absent presidential candidate from the vote was notably candidate Ted Cruz, who was busy campaigning in New Hampshire.

Critics of the blocked bill said it would damage small business and workers if it had been actioned, giving favor to Wall Street and the banks.

“We’ll see many members of Congress pushing the Fed to side with the bondholders and Wall Street on combating inflation rather than siding with main street and small businesses and workers in dealing with unemployment,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who spoke against the bill.

Other criticisms of the bill came from the former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a blog post for the Brookings Institution:

“The principal effect of the bill would be to make meeting-by-meeting monetary policy decisions subject to Congressional review… [with the transparency allowing] … political interventions in monetary policy decisions [that] would not lead to better results,” Bernanke wrote.

But logic would have Bernanke’s statement contrary to what the Bill – the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015 – would have seen imposed. According to the original backer of the auditing conception, former congressman Ron Paul opposed the irrationality argued by Bernanke, commenting on the logic.

“I can’t imagine anyone voting against transparency. This whole thing that it would be politicized if Congress has something to say about it — it’s always politicized,” he says, “it’s just who’s behind the scenes doing the politicizing. And that’s what they don’t want to know, because the special interests are the political forces that direct monetary policy,” Rand Paul said.

The bill would have awarded the General Accountability Office (GAO) greater power in auditing the Federal Reserve monetary policy makers. In the past, an audit conducted by the GAO revealed the hijacking of an institute by bankers that were supposedly regulated by the financial reform act. The audit uncovered more than the said $16 trillion to bail out the banks. Sen. Bernie Sanders stating “this is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

The bill would have given the GAO more power to investigate and audit the banks. Since the 2008 economic crisis, there has been little auditing of the Fed Reserve; and what has been done, has been very minimal.

The argument that transparency for the big banks is bad for business only highlights the very reason why we need this auditing process in the first place.

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