Joseph Salerno’s paper “A Modest Proposal for Reining in the Bernanke Fed” is now in the Top 10 in downloads on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in the category of “Response to Financial Crisis.” SSRN is the primary depository of working paper in economics and the social sciences. You can download Joe’s paper here for free.
Abstract:
In the years immediately prior to the financial crisis, the doctrine of an independent Fed had achieved broad and unquestioned acceptance, especially within the economics profession. Under cover of this doctrine the Fed deployed unconventional monetary policies to vastly expand its balance sheet as well as the range of its activities in financial markets. Recently, this unilateral and arbitrary expansion of the Fed’s powers combined with its failure to stimulate a robust recovery from the Great Recession has provoked increasing opposition even among some economists. In this changing intellectual climate, the time is ripe to implement a short-run program, under the existing regime of the fiat dollar, to terminate the Fed’s anomalous status as a quasi-independent agency and make it directly accountable to Congress like any other department or agency of the Executive Branch.
