[Arthur Burns, Nixon's Fed Chair, is reported to have said the following: “We dare not exercise our independence for fear of losing it.”]

From Whom Is the Fed Independent? To Whom Is It Accountable?

(excerpt)

We can safely predict that this natural tension between the President and the Fed will continue as far as we can imagine. It reflects the fact that the Fed is constitutionally accountable to the Congress, not to the President.

The Fed remains at all times a creature of Congress—if Congress exerts its authority. If Congress has the will, it can instruct, redirect, restructure, or even abolish the Fed. In addition, as the then-President of the New York Fed testified at Wright Patman’s hearings, “Obviously the Congress that set us up has the authority to review our actions at any time they want to, and in any way they want to.” Should Congress audit the Fed? Of course—and on an ongoing basis.

Apr 2025

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/from-whom-is-the-fed-independent-to-whom-is-it-accountable

Written by David Mashian, Investment Real Estate Funding

Jul 2020

In March of 2020, the single biggest news event of the decade hardly got any news coverage, and that is the Federal Reserve just got rolled into the US Treasury Department.This happened in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, so such massive news got drowned out by Corona Virus news and concerns. Most people don’t know what the Federal Reserve is or was. To put it simply, The Fed was a privately-owned banking cartel owned by foreign and domestic wealthy banking families who controlled the economic system of the United States by controlling its money supply. With this single act, the US government now owns “The Fed” and has the ability to govern its own financial destiny without acquiescing to a third-party entity whose interests are not aligned with WE THE PEOPLE. We, through our elected officials, now control our own money supply.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/federal-reserve-rolled-us-treasury-economic-forecast-david-mashian

Explaining the new Fed-Treasury emergency fund

April 2020 (excerpts)

In passing the CARES Act of 2020, Congress created something new under the sun: a Treasury fund of some $454 billion that must be invested in Federal Reserve (Fed) created emergency facilities. America has never seen anything like it. This explainer walks through what this new fund is, what it isn’t, and what the public can expect from these resources as they are deployed.

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The result, as is often the case with compromises, is a bit muddled, leaving much to be determined in the regulatory implementation of the statute.

First, in § 4003(c)(1),Treasury can attach “such terms and conditions . . . as the Secretary determines appropriate.”There is some guiding information on the kinds of terms and conditions (such as auditing and the appropriate interest rates that should be charged), but most of those determinations are left to Treasury to decide. This discretion applies to the full $500 billion, not just to the $46 billion in sectoral lending. This is a big stick should Treasury decide to use it.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/explaining-the-new-fed-treasury-emergency-fund/