Economists Against the Fed Audit Have Been on its Payroll

11/18/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In an effort to get transparency on the government bailouts, Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) have cosponsored amendment HR 1207 to audit the Fed. An opposition amendment introduced by Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC) claims to also seek Fed transparency, but limits the types of audits that could be performed. In support of Watt’s perspective are eight supposedly impartial economists.

Yet, according to Ryan Grim at HuffPost, “far from a broad cross-section, the ‘prominent economists’ lobbying on behalf of the Watt bill are in fact deeply involved with the Federal Reserve. Seven of the eight are either currently on the Fed’s payroll or have been in the past.” He goes on to write that “the connections that the seven economists lobbying Congress have to the Fed are not incidental and four of them maintain current positions.”

It makes perfect sense. If the Treasury and Wall Street can have unrestricted and unpunished back channel relationships… why can’t the Congress?

See the full coverage in The Huffington Post’s article on how the economists opposing a Fed audit have undisclosed ties to the Federal Reserve.

Rocky Vega

Rocky Vega is a regular contributor to The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

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