Rest Up, Scott Alvarez

Last week it was announced that Ron Paul will chair the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy, which oversees the Fed. This is good news. Since the elections in November, I'd been wondering how many more politicians were willing to sacrifice themselves and/or their party by protecting the status quo as represented by Bernanke and the Fed. Boehner wasn't willing to risk it, even though it's safe to assume there was lots of angst on this.

There's a ton of subpoena-ready material, and I'm sure Ron Paul is prioritizing his list right now. Something that's probably on it is the issue of government intervention in the stock market. Paul has been on this for many years. In 1998, he submitted written questions to the Fed and Treasury in which he specifically asked about stock market intervention. He couldn't get a conclusive answer, with Treasury taking a full year to send its incomplete response. This has been stuck in Paul's craw ever since and has occasionally bubbled up in Q&A sessions with various officials. In the past year, two members of Congress have asked Bernanke explicitly and in writing about the intervention issue, and he blatantly dodged their questions. Maybe we'll see how he answers when the stakes are much higher.