Former Fed Governor: "The Fed Isn't As Independent As Many Think"

With every passing day, the Fed is slowly losing the game, a point made earlier today by SocGen's Albert Edwards who wrotes that "Citizens Will Soon Turn Their Rage Towards Central Bankers."

And it is not just skeptical pundits, and former (and in some cases current) Fed presidents admitting central banks are increasingly powerless to boost the global economy and control inflation (or the Phillips curve) even if they still have sway over capital markets. What is far more insidious to the Fed's waning credibility is when former economists affiliated with the Fed start repeating mantras that until recently were only a prominent feature in the so-called fringe media.

This is what happened last April, when former central bank staffer and Dartmouth College economics professor Andrew Levin, special adviser to then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke between 2010 to 2012, made the whocking announcement that "A lot of people would be stunned to know” the extent to which the Federal Reserve is privately owned. The Fed “should be a fully public institution just like every other central bank” he added during a call seeking to make the Fed more transparent and accountable to the public.

Why was that stunning? Because it has long been a bone of contention if only among the fringe media, that at its core the Fed is merely a private institution, beholden only to its de facto owners: not the people of the U.S. but to a small cabal of banks. Worse, the actual org chart of who owns what is not disclosed, even as the vast majority of the U.S. population remains deluded that the Fed is a publicly owned institution.

At its core, the question goes to Fed independence: something which the Federal Reserve has long claimed to be, yet an assumption which increasingly more are starting to question even in polite, establishment society.

More