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#Fed

Open Thread - Thurs 14 Aug 2025 - The Fed

The Fed
I have never paid much attention to the Fed, what it is, how it worked, whatever. It's something that none of us, at least in almost all of my lifetime, could control. It seems to me to be an entity that makes things better for the rich, especially bankers, and 'bleh', on average, for the rest of us. It's 'politically independent' which means... means that TPTB rule it without any input from the lower classes. But it wasn't always like that as I learned recently from a good article by Matt Stoller 'Federal Reserve Independence Is Bad' with the subheading - 'Donald Trump wants to fire Fed Chair Jay Powell. He should be able to do so. The Fed needs to be controlled by elected leaders, not Wall Street. Even if those elected leaders are bad.'

I didn't at first agree with the subheading at all, except for the part about some elected leaders being bad. But then I read the article, and learned that up until the late 1970s the Fed was controlled by elected leaders, which is why it did a decent job for most of the country's people before that.


From The Week.

My Interactive Educational Pamphlet on the Economy/Fed (99% Complete)

I wrote an online pamphlet a few months ago for a class that I thought some people here might find interesting. The goal was to help people visualize the actions the Fed took post great-recession, the effects they had on the stock and bond markets, and whether they helped Americans on the whole.

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~adam.reilly/Final_209/final_209/