[ar9av]

I saw this last night, I found an article from some smart PhD dude who is a Yale prof and a former federal reserve governor, it explained what would happen if the fed lost money. Nothing much, unless they lose a lot of money for a long period of time.

[slv77]

There is a difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy. Monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve while fiscal policy is set by Congress (as laid out in the constitution) The activist Fed under “the courage to act” Bernanke and more recently under Powell moved from the realm of monetary policy to fiscal policy.

By massively expanding the Feds balance sheet with mortgage bonds the Federal Reserve massively increased the value of housing and lowered mortgage payments for existing homeowners. Prior to 2008 the Fed only bought US government securities so any market distortions it caused the benefit accrued to the Government.

As the Fed is now having to pay interest on reserves and higher inflation it is making the cost of those decisions more apparent.

Now, if Congress had said in 2008 that they wanted to write checks for a a couple of trillion dollars per year to homeowners and pay for it with a 10% tax (inflation) that would mostly benefit the old and wealthy and hit the young and poor the hardest they would be within their constitutional power to do so. It is unlikely that Congress would ever do so but the Federal Reserve made that decision. That makes me uncomfortable.

[kyrra]

I think the point the authors of the article were trying to make was that the Fed has operated for 90 years and never lost money. We've been through multiple financial crisis and not been in the situation. They are implying the current said is doing a poor job of running things.

[spaceman_2020]

It’s unreal to me that an unelected bunch of bankers at the Fed have such an outsized impact on the global economy, and yet when anyone challenges them, half the people actually defend them.

If there is any institution that should be under constant and heavy scrutiny at all times, it should be the Fed.

[epgui]

> If there is any institution that should be under constant and heavy scrutiny at all times, it should be the Fed.

First, I want to say that I agree with you 100% here. I even think maybe the accountability mechanisms might not be designed correctly, although I don't know enough to be sure.

> half the people actually defend them

In their defence though (and notwithstanding what I said above), they're all incredibly intelligent and competent professionals who happen to be at the helm of the ship in uncertain times. :shrug:

[blagie]

From my vintage, among the most competent governing institutions are the Supreme Court and the Fed, neither of which has any oversight. I'm not claiming any sort of perfection, but compared to congress, it's like night-and-day.

It'd be interesting to understand how and why. That's not true of all institutions without oversight.

[cheeseomlit]

I'm of the exact opposite opinion, I see those two groups as some of the absolute most harmful in modern US politics. I'll take a gridlocked congress over an activist SCOTUS legislating from the bench or an out of control Fed printing trillions of dollars for their banker friends any day of the week, though I suppose the gridlocked congress is part of what enables that behavior

[baq]

imagine the mess if there were elections for central bankers. fiscal authority is sort of elected. you really want somebody different in monetary authority...

[autoexec]

> We've been through multiple financial crisis and not been in the situation.

It's not as if any of those previous financial crises are comparable to what we're going through now though. These are very different times where we're coming out of unprecedented events. Maybe the Fed really is doing poorly, but I can't exactly remember a time in my life when everybody loved the Fed and what they were doing either. Is there some kind of golden age when everything was being handled correctly and we didn't have problems that we should be trying to go back to?

[qeternity]

We had a bubble in 2008 (not new) and a pretty mild pandemic in 2020 (also not new).

In the early 20th century we fought two World Wars. The only thing unprecedented is the scale of the Fed’s operations these days.

[epgui]

If I remember correctly, I think my History textbooks are a bit longer than that. I suspect this comment might not contain all of the information!