Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker to Retire in October
Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker to Retire in October
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker, one of the Fed system’s most outspoken advocates for higher...
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker, one of the Fed system’s most outspoken advocates for higher short-term interest rates in recent years, will retire Oct. 1 after 28 years at the bank, the regional Fed bank said Tuesday.
The Richmond Fed’s board of directors has formed a search committee led by Chairwoman Margaret Lewis to find a new president, and has hired the firm of Heidrick & Struggles to assist in the search, the bank said. The bank intends to conduct “a nationwide search to identify a broad, diverse and highly qualified candidate pool for this leadership role,” it said.
Mr. Lacker became the second Fed official to announce his plans to retire in 2017. Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart will step down at the end of February.
“Jeff has been an outstanding leader for the Richmond Fed and has made many contributions to the Federal Reserve System,” Ms. Lewis said in a statement announcing his departure.
A Richmond Fed spokesman said Mr. Lacker wants to return to teaching, writing and academic research, though he had no details on where Mr. Lacker may go after he leaves the bank later this year.
Mr. Lacker joined the Richmond Fed in 1989 and served in various leadership positions before becoming president in August 2004. For the past decade he has anchored the Fed’s hawkish wing, warning of the risks of rising inflation and dissenting often in favor of a higher benchmark federal-funds rate, which officials held near zero for six years following the financial crisis.
He was a voting member of the Fed’s policy committee in 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2015, and dissented a total of 15 times out of 32 meetings.
Mr. Lacker also argued against the Fed’s interventions in financial markets throughout the financial crisis, and has said financial instability was worsened by expectations that the Fed would always provide a backstop for financial firms in trouble.
Over the past year, he has also argued against efforts to overhaul the Fed system, including measures that would subject the Fed’s interest-rate decisions to greater congressional scrutiny or tie its policy to a mathematical formula.
“I’m hoping that our leaders in Congress and the administration understand that our independence is of value and is important to the credibility of the country’s commitment to price stability and I hope they’re willing to proceed accordingly,” he said after the November presidential election.
Mr. Lacker said in a statement Tuesday he felt fortunate “to have participated in some of the most extraordinary policy deliberations in our nation’s history. It’s been my deepest privilege to lead the Richmond Fed and the dedicated people who work here.”
The search to replace Mr. Lacker is likely to face scrutiny from activists and congressional Democrats who have called for more diversity among the Fed’s upper ranks, as well as more openness about how it selects its regional bank leaders.
Following Mr. Lockhart’s announcement last year, the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign said it hoped the next Atlanta Fed president would be black or Hispanic, which would be a first for a regional Fed bank.
In an unusual move, a group of African-American House members wrote to Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and the chairman of the Atlanta Fed’s board urging them to consider candidates of diverse racial, ethnic, gender and professional backgrounds. The lawmakers also noted that most of the presidents worked at major financial firms before their appointments.
“We hope that candidates from distinctive sectors like academia, labor, and nonprofit organizations are given due consideration,” they wrote.
Before joining the Richmond Fed, Mr. Lacker was an assistant professor of economics at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University and previously worked at Wharton Econometrics in Philadelphia, the bank said.
The bank posted information about its search process on its website Tuesday.
By Kate Davidson
Source
The Fed’s Main Job Is Jobs, And A Coalition Plans To Keep It On Task
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve...
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve Friday when the Labor Department releases its August unemployment statistics. But where will the Fed’s eyes be focused? A group of activists are planning the next steps of their effort to keep the Fed focused on the continuing unemployment crisis, and keep the Fed from taking actions that will make things worse for millions still seeking work.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Shawn Sebastian of the Center for Popular Democracy, who was part of a group of activists and unemployed people who confronted members of the Fed at last month’s economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo. That includes following up on a promise by Fed chair Janet Yellen to meet with the group in Washington and pressing a more detailed plan for how the Fed should proceed to help the Main Street economy grow.
“We are going to be looking at the full range of policy options,” Sebastian said.
The “inflation hawks” were poised to seize the narrative when the members of the Fed attended the Jackson Hole summit. These Fed members, egged on by conservative academics and policymakers, want the Fed to put the brakes on economic growth and turn its attention to fighting inflation, even though there are no signs that inflation is an imminent threat. On the contrary, wages as a percentage of economic output are at their lowest level since the late 1940s (while corporate profits as a share of the economy are at record highs), one sign that there are far more people looking for work than there are jobs for them.
What the hawks did not count on was the Center for Popular Democracy’s ragtag group of 10 unemployed people and activist supporters. They trekked to Jackson Hole to confront Fed members with their stories of struggling to find decent jobs, along with a demand that the Fed not abandon its unfinished role in rebuilding the middle-class economy, in the form of a letter endorsed by more than 70 organizations. Their biggest success, Sebastian said, was a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George, who just before Jackson Hole said in an interview with CNBC that it was time for the Fed to begin thinking about raising interest rates “when you see the economy getting as close as we are to full employment.”
But Sebastian and his group told George that the economy was nowhere near full employment and that the analysis of the inflation hawks was “lacking in relevance, substance and rigor.” One member of the group told of how she went from being an MBA who had risen to a management job over 15 years to being laid off and unable to find work for months, finally settling for a job that paid half as much as the job she lost.
It’s not clear what substantive effect hearing these stories had on George and other inflation hawks on the Fed, Sebastian said. “But I do hope we contributed to her thinking and we also started an engagement” with the Fed, he said. Fed members now know that when they discuss economic policy, “you can’t make decisions without public scrutiny anymore, because we’re paying attention now.”
One of the ideas that the group will refine and attempt to build consensus around would have the Fed invest directly in infrastructure bonds and similar government instruments, in much the same way that it purchased billions in bonds to prop up the financial sector in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, helped boost Wall Street share prices, according to most experts, but had no direct effect on job-creation or on bringing the economic recovery to communities around the country hardest hit by the crash – as the nation has now vividly seen in Ferguson, Mo.
Having the Fed directly buy bonds that would enable federal, state or local governments to fund transportation projects, school construction or other public facilities would put the Fed’s power to work in ways that directly creates jobs in the short run and assets that enhance the nation’s competitiveness and well-being in the long run.
The Fed could also better use its regulatory authority to prod the banks to pour into the economy the close to $2 trillion that is now sitting in its vaults. That hoarded cash could be put to work creating jobs and lifting the wages of working-class people.
Whatever policies take shape during the next phase of the Center for Popular Democracy’s campaign to keep the Fed focused on full employment, Sebastian says that the opening round has been a success in sending the message that “we’re not in an inflation crisis … we are in an unemployment crisis. You can’t ignore an ongoing crisis for the sake of a ghost of inflation that may or may not appear.”
Central Bankers to Confront Stock-Market Turmoil at Fed’s Annual Jackson Hole Retreat
Gathering at the mountain getaway in recent Augusts, the stewards of global currency have contended with the looming...
Gathering at the mountain getaway in recent Augusts, the stewards of global currency have contended with the looming collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, global deflation worries in 2010, serial Greek fiscal meltdowns and other dramas. This time, they confront a big disparity between the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and China.
The U.S. has recovered enough from the last financial crisis that Fed officials have been preparing to raise interest rates to prevent overheating down the road. But China appears to have lost economic momentum, driving the People’s Bank of China to cut rates and take other measures to boost growth. Markets have responded to these conflicting forces with turbulence, creating new uncertainties for policy makers about the economic outlook.
Before this week’s turmoil, Fed officials had signaled they might move as soon as next month to start lifting their benchmark interest rate from near zero, where it has been since December 2008. It was shaping up to be a tough decision even before the stock-market corrections around the globe. Now, the odds of a rate increase in September appear to have diminished, though a move is still possible if markets stabilize and new economic data show the U.S. economy is strengthening despite threats abroad.
New reports on Tuesday showed increases in U.S. consumer confidence and new home sales in August and July, respectively, reasons for Fed officials not to become too glum about the U.S. outlook.
“Prior to these market events in the last few days, I thought that this was about as close to a 50/50 call as you can get,” said former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder of the odds that the central bank would raise U.S. rates in September. If markets don’t stabilize, he said, the Fed would likely hold off on a rate increase.
“If the markets are in anything close to the sort of tizzy they have been in the last few days, then the Fed will not throw a match into the fire” when it meets September 16-17, said Mr. Blinder, a Princeton University professor and friend of Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen.
Ms. Yellen will not be attending this year’s Jackson Hole conference, but Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer is scheduled to deliver remarks there Saturday on inflation. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi won’t be there, but the ECB and many of the world’s other central banks will be represented by senior officials. The meeting has included top central bankers from Turkey, Malta, Sweden, South Korea and beyond in the past.
It is a fraught moment for all of the world’s central banks. China’s repeated efforts to stimulate growth don’t seem to be working. China’s central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Tuesday and its stock market fell.
Many other economies are trapped in the middle of a global monetary tug of war between the two economic giants, especially emerging markets and commodity-producing countries. Their economies have been hit by China’s slowdown. At the same time, their currencies have been declining against the dollar as the Fed prepares for higher rates. If central banks in places such as Brazil, South Africa or Russia try to stimulate their economies by cutting interest rates, they risk capital flight and potentially destabilizing currency depreciation. If they don’t, they risk deep recessions.
One potential fault line that Fed officials are watching carefully: Heavy loads of U.S. dollar debt accumulated by local companies in emerging markets. Total corporate bonds outstanding in emerging markets have almost doubled since 2008 to $6.8 trillion, according to Institute of International Finance estimates. The share of this debt issued in U.S. dollars rose from less than 15% in 2008 to more than 40% in the first five months of 2015.
Those debts become harder to pay off as the dollar appreciates. It is up more than 7% against a broad basket of other currencies so far this year.
The central banks also face skepticism about the paths they are charting. “Our global economy is fixated on central banks and the latest utterance of the monetary authorities,” said Judy Shelton,senior fellow of the Atlas Network, a free-market think tank participating in a parallel conference critical of the Fed this week, also in Wyoming. The title of her panel, “What Happens if Central Bankers are Wrong?”
Central banks for the major developed economies, including the Fed, responded to the post-financial crisis period of slow economic growth and low inflation by pushing short-term interest rates to near zero and launching bond-buying programs to drive long-term interest rates down, too.
Many central bankers say the economy would have been in much worse shape, possibly a repeat of the Great Depression, without the support. Critics like Ms. Shelton say the policies failed to produce the higher inflation or faster growth desired.
As the Fed considers when to start raising rates, officials are getting pressure from several sides. While many free-market advocates would like the central bank to move, liberal activists plan to press the Fed this week to hold rates near zero to promote economic growth and more hiring.
“The economy is too weak to warrant interest-rate hikes,” said Shawn Sebastian, policy analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning group, in a statement on Tuesday.
Academics don’t provide clear direction. In competing newspaper opinion pieces this week, Harvard professors Martin Feldstein andLawrence Summers, who have served as economic advisers to Republicans and Democrats, respectively, argued for and against a Fed rate increase in September.
From the maelstrom, Fed officials are trying to respond to the unfolding economic outlook.
Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart on Monday said he still expects the central bank to raise rates this year, but he didn’t say when. That marked a subtle shift since Aug. 4, when he told The Wall Street Journal he believed the economy was ready for a rate increasein September.
Current developments like “the appreciation of the dollar, the devaluation of the Chinese currency and the further decline of oil prices are complicating factors in predicting the pace of growth,” Mr. Lockhart said Monday. But, he noted, “our baseline forecast at the Atlanta Fed is for moderate growth with continuing employment gains and a gradually rising rate of inflation.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
111 Miles in Ten Days: Marchers Take Nonviolent Message From Charlottesville to D.C.
111 Miles in Ten Days: Marchers Take Nonviolent Message From Charlottesville to D.C.
About a hundred people are walking north from downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, the scene of a white supremacist...
About a hundred people are walking north from downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, the scene of a white supremacist rally and riot this month, to Washington, D.C., 111 miles away. The journey—a nonviolent response to the violence of the hate groups that descended on Charlottesville—is expected to take ten days.
They are led by the Reverend Cornell William Brooks, a civil rights lawyer and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
Read the full article here.
Death Cab For Cutie shares a new, anti-Trump track
Death Cab For Cutie shares a new, anti-Trump track
Death Cab For Cutie is no fan of Donald Trump. The group has released a new song, “Million Dollar Loan,” inspired by...
Death Cab For Cutie is no fan of Donald Trump. The group has released a new song, “Million Dollar Loan,” inspired by the candidate’s dubious claims of rising from the bottom on his own when he was actually launched into the business world on the back of a million-dollar loan from his father. In a statement, Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard said that he wrote the song after being “disgusted” by how “flippant” Trump was in his assertions. He goes on to say Trump is “beneath us,” noting that “Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape, or form represents what this country truly stands for.”
“Million Dollar Loan” is the first song from the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project, launched by the writer Dave Eggers. Imagined as a continuation of his 2012 “90 Days, 90 Reasons” project, “30 Days, 30 Songs” will, as its title suggests, launch a new, anti-Trump song into the world every day until the election. According to a press release, tracks will be a mixture of new material and unheard songs, and this week’s offerings will include original cuts from Aimee Mann, Jim James, Thao Nguyen, Bhi Bhiman, and Daveed Diggs’ group Clipping, as well as a never-before-heard-unless-you-were-there live song from R.E.M.
All of the tracks will be available on the 30 Days, 30 Songs website, as well as on both Spotify and Apple Music. You can also pick up the songs on iTunes, and all proceeds will be donated to the Center For Popular Democracy, a group that is working to ensure universal voter registration for all Americans.
By Marah Eakin
Source
Economic Sector Bias at the Federal Reserve
Economic Sector Bias at the Federal Reserve
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly...
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly outnumber women in key posts at Federal Reserve Banks throughout the United States despite the Fed's Congressional mandate. In part two of this posting, I want to take an additional look at the Fed's bias; its failure to represent the economic diversity of America.
For those of you that either didn't read part one or who are unaware of the Federal Reserve's organizational setup, here is a graphic from a report by the Center for Popular Democracy showing the link between the Federal Reserve and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its district banks known as Federal Reserve Banks:
Here is a map showing the regions covered by each of the 12 district banks (Federal Reserve Banks) and the 24 branches within each district:
Note that Alaska and Hawaii are covered by the San Francisco district.
If we start at the top of the organizational chart, the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a 14-year term of office. The President (and Senate) also confirm two members of the Board to be Chair (currently Janet Yellen) and Vice Chair for four year terms. The FOMC consists of 12 members; the seven aforementioned Board members, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and four other regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating, one-year term basis. The Federal Reserve Banks form an important link between the Federal Reserve and their local economy and help to dictate the Federal Reserve's monetary policies. Each of the twelve district banks has their own president and boards of directors (nine directors in total for each bank); in addition, each of the 24 district branches has its own directors (seven directors in total for each branch). The Board of Directors for each Reserve Bank are appointed in two ways; the majority are appointed by the Reserve Bank and the remainder are appointed by the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. The directors for each district bank then appoint their own president and vice president. It all sounds rather nepotistic, doesn't it?
By law, under the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve are to be
"...elected with due but not exclusive consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers.".
That is, each of the leaders/directors of the world's most influential central bank and its district banking system are to represent a wide variety of each of the economic sectors that make up the American economy.
The report by the Center for Popular Democracy compares the economic sector representation during the period from 2006 to 2010 when the Government Accountability Office examined the composition of the Federal Reserve Bank Boards and the present. Here is a graphic showing the past and present composition:
In both 2006 to 2010 and 2016, directors from the banking sector filled over one-third of the board seats, growing by 3 percentage points over the timeframe of the study. In combination, in 2016, representatives from the commercial and industrial sector and the banking sector filled 68 percent of seats, up from 63 percent in 2006 to 2010. The service sector's representation fell from 26 percent of seats to 18 percent and agriculture and food processing saw their representation fall from 6 percent of seats to 3 percent. Interestingly, even though they are relatively poorly represented compared to the other sectors, the number of directors affiliated with consumer and community organizations rose from 3 percent to 8 percent.
For your illumination, here are a few of the Directors for each of the Federal Reserve Banks that you can get a sense of who is dictating America's monetary policies:
If you are interested in who is on the boards of the other Federal Reserve Banks, please see the original report.
Interestingly, during the "financial crisis" of 2008, there was some question about directors' independence and actions taken by the Federal Reserve banks since there was at least the perception of conflicts of interest when director-affliated institutions took part in the Federal Reserve System's emergency programs. With a preponderance of representation from the banking and commercial sectors, it certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out which sectors of the economy will likely be favoured by Federal Reserve policies should there be another "financial crisis", does it?
By A Political Junkie
Source
Did two women in an elevator just change everything?
Did two women in an elevator just change everything?
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that...
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that could change the country's future. Was it two women in an elevator, yelling at him?
Read the full article here.
¿Vale la pena quitarle dinero a la policía para apoyar temas como la vivienda, la educación y la salud?
¿Vale la pena quitarle dinero a la policía para apoyar temas como la vivienda, la educación y la salud?
Un nuevo informe analiza el concepto de 'desinversión de la policía'. La controversial idea es fomentada por activistas...
Un nuevo informe analiza el concepto de 'desinversión de la policía'. La controversial idea es fomentada por activistas latinos y afroestadounidenses, buscando menos discriminación y más apoyo a las minorías.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a...
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the Federal Reserve’s ability to unilaterally counteract it. If the Fed decides higher wages risk inflation, they can raise interest rates and deliberately strangle economic growth, reversing the wage effect. Why come up with ways to grow the economy, then, if the Fed will react by intentionally slowing it?
The reason the Fed operates as a wet blanket on the economy has to do with who really controls the institution. If the desires of bankers and the rich outweigh the desires of laborers, then their fear of inflation (which cuts into their profits) will always take precedence over full employment. Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke unwittingly gave a perfect example of that yesterday. Talking about how the Fed could institute “helicopter drops” of money to supplement federal spending and jump-start the economy, he stated from the outset, “no responsible government would ever literally drop money from the sky.” Who sets the boundaries of what’s “responsible” matters a great deal here.
To make the central bank work in the public interest rather than the interests of a select few, you must reform the very structure of the Federal Reserve. That’s the purpose of a new proposal from Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and former advisor to Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. In conjunction with the activist group Fed Up, which advocates for pro-worker policies at the Fed, Levin has devised a framework to make the central bank a fully public institution, with all the transparency and accountability demanded of other government entities.
It’s such an important idea that Warren Gunnels, policy director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, talked it up yesterday on a conference call with Levin. While stopping short of endorsing taking the Fed public, Gunnels did say, “Senator Sanders believes we need to made the Fed a more democratic institution, responsive to the concerns of all Americans, not a few billionaires on Wall Street.”
Right now, the Fed is a quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid, taking advantage of that status to maintain high levels of secrecy. Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, like other federal agencies. But the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks are legally owned by commercial banks in each of those regions. Banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo hold stock in these regional banks, which happen to be one of their primary regulators.
This was how central banks worldwide operated at the time of the Fed’s founding, but that has changed. “Every other central bank around the world is fully public,” Professor Levin said, citing the Bank of Canada’s shift in the 1930s and the Bank of England in the 1940s.
Not only does having private banks own a chunk of the Fed raise questions about regulatory supervision, it implicitly privileges banker concerns over the public at large. This is particularly important because the Fed has failed as an institution consistently over the past decade.
First it failed to identify an $8 trillion housing bubble, along with increases in leverage and derivatives exposure that magnified the housing collapse into a larger crisis. Then, it failed to deploy all its policy tools and allowed a slow recovery to take hold that left millions of workers behind, as growth never caught up to its expectations. British economist Simon Wren-Lewis believes the third big mistake is happening now, through premature interest rate hikes to return to “normal” operations. “Central banks are wasting a huge amount of potential resources” by tightening too quickly, Wren-Lewis says. For everyday Americans, that translates into millions more people out of work than necessary.
So Levin’s plan would cash out the banks’ stock, and begin to remove their influence over the Fed. The board of directors of the regional Fed banks, which currently includes commercial bank executives, would be chosen through a representative process with mandates for diversity (no African-American has ever served as a regional Fed president) and a variety of viewpoints. Nobody affiliated with a financial institution overseen by the Fed could serve on any regional board.
These newly elected boards of directors would choose the regional presidents, which have a say on monetary policy decisions. That selection process would include public hearings and feedback. Under the current system, Fed presidents are re-elected through a pro forma process, with no opportunity for public engagement. Four of the 12 regional presidents were formerly executives at Goldman Sachs, and it’s hard to call that a coincidence.
In addition to breaking the conflict of interest inherent in current Fed governance, making the institution public would subject it to disclosure requirements, Freedom of Information Act requests, and external reviews that all other public agencies must submit to. Levin’s proposal calls for an annual Government Accountability Office review of Fed policies and procedures, and would allow the Fed’s inspector general new authority to investigate the regional banks.
The Levin proposal too often makes concessions to preserving central bank “independence,” like preserving the regional structure and giving Fed officials nonrenewable seven-year terms, which seems a little arbitrary. This impulse also led Democrats to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed earlier this year. The rhetoric of Federal Reserve “independence” conceals an institutional capture that allows it to ignore workers’ needs in favor of the wealthy. And its persistent failures and banker influence weaken the case for that independence.
Nevertheless, the heart of the proposal is to return democracy to the Fed, so the institution will edge away from its commitment to capital over labor. “The fundamental piece is that the Fed must be a public institution,” said Ady Barkan of the Fed Up Coalition.
Liberals too often ignore the Fed and the role it plays in the economy, but that’s starting to change. An obscure piece of the Federal Reserve Act statute identified by then-House staffer Matt Stoller led to a remarkable cut of billions of dollars in subsidies to big banks last year, under a Republican-majority Congress. Now the Fed Up coalition is not only rolling out this reform plan, but pushing the presidential candidates to answer whether the Fed should deliberately slow down the economy, make sure their institution looks like the general public, and reduce the power of private banks on its operations. (Bernie Sanders laid out his views on Fed reform in the New York Times last December, some of which intersect with the Fed Up proposal. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ Policy Director, would only say that the Fed Up plan “deserves serious consideration.”)
A public, inclusive debate over Fed transparency and accountability is critical, given the importance of this institution to the economy. “These reforms would put the Fed on a path to serving the public for the next 100 years,” said Professor Levin. And that has to mean all the public, through democratic principles, not just the executives at our biggest banks.
By David Dayen
Source
Opioid protest at Harvard art museum
Opioid protest at Harvard art museum
ctivists said that this was the fourth protest of its kind targeting an art gallery or school named after the Sackler...
ctivists said that this was the fourth protest of its kind targeting an art gallery or school named after the Sackler family. The Sacklers have their names on spaces at the Louvre, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Smithsonian, and the Guggenheim in New York, among others. The Center for Popular Democracy, the nonprofit that supports the Opioid Network, also participated in Goldin’s protest at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in April.
Read the full article here.
1 month ago
1 month ago