The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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December 12, 2009

Your View: Transparency a must for Federal Reserve

Jon Kovaciny, Mankato





I strongly urge our senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, to follow the lead of Rep. Tim Walz in co-sponsoring a bill requiring more transparency for the Federal Reserve, our nation’s central bank.

The Fed, under chairman Ben Bernanke, played a significant role in engineering and executing the bailouts. Hundreds of billions of dollars were created and doled out to various banks, financial firms, and even foreign central banks, yet we have no legal way of seeing who or how much. The Fed also creates new money to secretly purchase assets on the open market.

This remarkable power is not something that one would expect to find in a representative government; indeed, the Federal Reserve is technically not part of government but rather a private banking cartel given special powers by Congress in 1913, under pressure from the banking industry. In its 96-year history, the Federal Reserve has never been subjected to a full audit of its operations.

Last May, Walz co-sponsored H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. Since that time, support for the bill has grown to include 73 percent of the House. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 79 percent of Americans support a full audit. It is time for Franken and Klobuchar to co-sponsor the Senate version of the bill, S. 604.

Among the Fed’s stated goals are economic and monetary stability. Under the Fed, we’ve endured more than a dozen recessions and the Great Depression, and today’s dollar has less than a 20th of a 1913 dollar’s purchasing power. For an institution with so much unchecked power and such a dismal record, transparency is a must.

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