Janet Yellen, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, center, walks past a protester as she arrives for the Jackson Hole economic symposium, sponsored by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank: Bradly Boner/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThere’s some historical elegance to the fact that the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is roughly as old as the modern Fed itself. The symposium, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, started in 1978.
Michael Greve introduces “adversarial corporatism,” a new conceptual lens through which to view the growing and contentious collaboration of industry and government. Adversarial corporatism takes the conventional story of crony capitalism and regulatory capture—a story appealing to critics on the left and the right alike—and adds a dose of a starker reality: the cooperation is there, unquestionably, but so is a mutual antagonism that exists side-by-side and sometimes symbiotically with that cooperation. If Greve’s oxymoron confuses a reader coming at this literature for the first time, it clarifies a dynamic that administrative law scholars have been watching for many years.…
Since the ten intense months of debates that preceded the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, has there been a better time to consider the structural design of the Federal Reserve System and its various components? We sit ready to commemorate the Fed’s centennial, which provides a worthwhile (if somewhat arbitrary) moment of reflection. In the coming months, President Obama will make just the second nomination of a new Fed Chair in the last thirty-five years. And the Fed’s own extraordinary market interventions during 2007-2010 and its innovations in monetary policy from 2008 to the present have opened…
Peter Conti-Brown has developed a cogent analysis of the constitutionality of the present-day Federal Reserve System’s ongoing operations.[1] His discussion of constitutional principles applied to the Fed’s contemporary monetary policy is both enlightening and logical. I learned from it, and I agree with his conclusions. I wish to pursue in this comment the second constitutional issue…
Peter Conti-Brown’s essay provides an excellent overview of the constitutional objections to the Federal Reserve and to the structure of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). I want to approach the questions that he addresses from a slightly different angle, by asking why politicians and courts treat the Federal Reserve as if it were constitutionally…
The Federal Reserve Board of 1917