Central Planning by Central Bankers

One of the problems that anyone who is critical of the Federal Reserve System faces is the fact that he is regarded as someone without any expertise in the area of money and banking.

In a 2009 article, the Huffington Post went into considerable detail about the number of people with PhD degrees in economics employed by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. This is the government’s branch of the Federal Reserve. It is not one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, all of which are privately owned. The Board of Governors at the time the article was written had 220 full-time economists on its staff. The author did attempt to find out how many economists are on the payroll of the 12 regional banks, but he could not. These are major institutions. Each of them publishes its own monthly magazine.

In terms of the number of people with PhD degrees in economics who specialize in money and banking nationally, there may be as many as 1500, but it could be as few as 1000. Anyway, that was the case in 2009. So, we’re talking about a situation in which perhaps as many as a third of all the specialists in the field are employed by some branch of the Federal Reserve. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The Federal Reserve has part-time contracts that it doles out to economists in the field. It sets aside almost half a billion every year to pay economists. That is an enormous amount of money to flow in the direction of a single profession.

Here’s a situation in which the agency that controls monetary policy for the United States has an unlimited amount of money to buy support, compliance, or least silence within that segment of professionally trained economists that specializes in money and banking. The Federal Reserve gets to keep all the money that it wants for operations. It has to turn back over to the Treasury Department any money that is not used for operations, but it does not answer to Congress or the Treasury with respect to how it spends its money. This means that the Federal Reserve has essentially unlimited funds available to buy off those critics who might challenge Federal Reserve policy.

Read More At: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/gary-north/when-the-fed-goes-down/