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Fed faces 'stiffest challenge to authority' in years
AFP - Monday, November 22
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Fed faces 'stiffest challenge to authority' in years
WASHINGTON (AFP) - – The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to aid the US recovery, but acting when politicians could not or would not has sparked the fiercest challenge to its authority in decades, analysts said.
In the weeks since the Fed boldly began to pump 600 billion dollars into the US economy, a swirl of criticism has encircled the central bank.
Abroad, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has been accused of recklessly devaluing the dollar -- destabilizing global trade by making US exports cheaper -- and of hypocrisy for criticizing similar moves by China.
At home critics, emboldened by congressional election victories, have accused the Fed of spurring long-term inflation and pushing up prices for ordinary Americans.
The deference once shown to the Fed under former chairman Alan Greenspan is a distant memory, shot to pieces by the bank's failure to prevent the Great Recession under his stewardship.
Former Fed officials agree the august institution is coming under more criticism now than at almost any time since the 1980s -- when officials were assailed for focusing on inflation rather than exploding unemployment.
Today the Fed is criticized for the reverse: For focusing too much on jobs.
In a sign of how modish Fed-bashing has become, possible Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin has made a rare foray into the realm of monetary policy, accusing the bank of printing money "out of thin air" and cautioning it "shouldn't be playing around with inflation."
The independent central bank, much happier away from the political limelight, has nonetheless come out swinging, vociferously arguing that fresh spending was necessary to underpin a still feeble economic recovery.
Wary of deepening a policy turf war, Bernanke has avoided an unspoken truth: The bank acted because hell would have frozen over before lawmakers approved more stimulus from taxpayer dollars.
But seasoned observers say the clash is still as much about political turf as it is about policy.
"The Fed's latest action crosses the line from monetary policy into fiscal policy that is the role of Congress and the president rather than the Fed," said former Fed economist Phillip Swagel.
"Given that Congress has considered more fiscal stimulus and decided against it, it is not surprising that members of Congress are criticizing the Fed for taking this step."
But if by crossing the line the Fed has irked Congress, it has also let elected representatives off the hook, according to former Fed official Vincent Reinhart.
"They are facilitating the bad behavior of the White House and the Congress, because they are thwarting some of the consequences of their inaction," said Reinhart, now of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
In recent days the criticism has snowballed further, its focus lurching away from critiques of stimulus spending to questions about the bank's very purpose and its independence.
High-profile Republican lawmakers Mike Pence and Bob Corker this week called for legislation that would end the bank's dual mandate by eliminating its mission to fight unemployment and focusing the central bank solely on price stability.
That would spell a dramatic change in policy that would likely preclude any additional moves to prime the recovery.
Although Corker and Pence's drive is unlikely to succeed, former officials agree it could still have an impact on the Fed's willingness to embark on new stimulus if needed.
"If they were in a box where they could not see any of this, then technocrats would say 'we need to do more and already should have been doing more for some months now,'" said Joseph Gagnon of The Peterson Institute for International Economics.
"That is what the technocratic Fed policy mechanism would have done, I know, I was a part of it," he said.
"But they are not in a box isolated from the world, they see that almost nobody is asking them to do more, and a small but vocal minority is saying stop... They will err on the side of caution."
Swagel agreed: "It will make the Fed somewhat more hesitant to engage in extraordinary policy in the future."
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