Straight Outta Pyongyang

Yesterday the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of its 2006 Federal Open Market Committee meetings.

I didn’t think I could be surprised at this point by these bubble-era artifacts, but there really is a lot of maddening stuff. Binyamin Appelbaum hits some of the main points here. The WSJ has a meeting-by-meeting analysis here. Take your blood pressure medication first.

These transcripts are the latest proof that the Fed desperately needs not just more oversight and transparency, but real reform. A good start would be for Congress to subpoena all FOMC transcripts through 2010 and to change future releases to a one-year lag. These are tenured, unelected policymakers whose disastrous decisions -- often made with cultish deference and groupthink-inflected jokes and laughter, the new transcripts show -- destroyed retirements, impacted every American, and affected the course of U.S. history. The public must be able to judge their individual performance and basic competence in a timely fashion. That's impossible when the best record of that performance is kept under lock and key for five years.

And on the subject of basic competence, one can’t help but notice that many of the participants in those 2006 meetings are still at the Fed. Tim Geithner, whose obsequious tribute to Alan Greenspan in January 2006 would have been perfect for an invasion-eve meeting at Saddam’s palace of the Baghdad chapter of Toastmasters International, failed upward. These people are still running things.

To the extent it reflects increased awareness of and outrage over these issues, Ron Paul’s popularity is heartening (and he has the enthusiastic endorsement of this blog). One hopes he won’t settle for a primetime stemwinder on the Fed at the convention. He deserves – and this country urgently needs – much more than that.