Fed Up

[...while I agree that the need for more regulation, not less, is
borne out by recent events in the financial arena...putting too much
emphasis onto any one agency is not necessarily the answer. Due to the
vital necessity of our economy remaining on an even keel, having
seperate/redundant oversight facilities seems to make more sense.
Above all these agencies need to have the power to penalize those who
try to work outside the legal boundaries. This one remains thorny...]

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Barney Frank wants to give the Fed more regulatory power:

http://tinyurl.com/ap2uot

Congress is moving to create strong new oversight of the financial
sector that would likely give the Federal Reserve authority to examine
the workings of a wide range of companies in an attempt to address one
of the key failures that led to the financial crisis.

But the initiative, which could be finalized in the House by
spring, is raising concerns about whether it would muddy the Fed's
traditional mission and concentrate too much power in a single federal
body.

This is just an initial gut reaction on my part, but I don't really
care much for this idea. Rationalizing our hodgepodge of regulatory
agenices is a good idea, but the Fed chairman already has enormous
power over the economy ? too much power, perhaps ? and placing both
monetary authority and a vastly increased centralized regulatory
authority under a single person strikes me as a pretty severe case of
putting all our eggs in one basket. I'd prefer instead to see the Fed
streamlined a bit, with an entirely new agency taking over the
super-regulatory role if that's the road we go down.

I'm open to arguments on this, of course. But the instinct to create a
single, vast, centralized oversight agency whenever something goes
wrong ? like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
created after 9/11 ? deserves to be resisted. It's the kind of thing
that makes people think they're solving a problem when they're really
just redrawing the org chart. It also makes dissent harder, and that's
no good thing. We could probably use more of that, not less.

Kevin Drum
--

http://gssites.com/congrats/index.html
.

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