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"United Scholars For The Fed" - Petition Signatories Update
Update on the petition of "scholars" who believe the Fed's status quo is the only way to maintain their tenure. The full list for your convenience. Alas, Ben Dover from DeVry is nowhere to be found in the list... Correction - he is, #58. Also, #29 is not all that surprising. #33 and #215 were, of course, to be expected.
Additionally, the organizer of this whole shindig seems to be Anil Kashyap of Chicago Booth. Is it at all surprising that his bio has the following data:
Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1991, Kashyap spent three
years as an economist for the Board of Governors for the Federal
Reserve System. He currently works as a consultant for the Federal
Reserve Bank of Chicago, and serves as a member of the Economic
Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as a
Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).Kashyap serves as co-organizer of the NBER's Working Group on the
Japanese Economy and of the NBER’s Working Group on the Functioning of
Financial Firms and Resolution of their Distress, is a member of both
the American Economic Association and American Finance
Association, and cofounded the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum. He is one of
the two faculty directors of the Chicago Booth’s Initiative on Global
Markets.
We think not.
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frankly I think they all should be taken out and shot......
with a super soaker of course...:)
In addition to Ben Dover, we have other taxpayor advocates missing from this group:
Lou Bjorectem and Phil McKracken
Many of them are on Permanent Resident Card or freshly naturalized. They will NOT want to rock the boat. Trying to dissent in academia can be lethal.
I lol'd @ "Alas, Ben Dover from DeVry is nowhere to be found in the list."
I graduated DeVry in 96'. Great post.
Aren't these all the people responsible for the collapse?
BINGO!
#215 strikes me as amusing.
I would like to get rid of the Fed entirely, but I will never get my wish.
In lieu of that an audit sounds like the next best thing - until I realized that this would make the Fed even more susceptible to political whim. Given the choice, I'd rather Bernanke run the Fed than Barney frank. Forcing the Fed to submit to an ever more powerful government concentrates power on the Hill and that seems worse than the crap we already have.
Heh, let's see if my submission of I. Lou Minatti from Friends of Global Progress makes the cut for tomorrow.
I miss good ole Ben Dover. It's been a while since we parted ways. I seem to be unable to hold these relationships very long. I guess my first experience with Seymour Butts under the bleachers tainted me for life. Be that as it may, I often fantasize about having a Skyline Chili three-way with Ben Dover and Rebecca Jarvis. Please Rebecca. Consider my fantasy. Ben has already agreed.
I have heard that a certain Mr. Madoff, signed this petition recently. =D
Did someone call for Ben Dover?? I hear he is on his way over here from the blogspot site
The Constitution gave Congress the powers to create the Fed--and Congress created a monster. That monster has spawned two depressions. The first time at FDR's insistence the private investors ate the losses. This time, with Timmy's help, the Fed & Treasury want to put the losses on the taxpayers' backs.
Do your job, Congress. Pluck the Fed out of the greedy hands of Wall Street. Cut their leverage. Bring back Glass-Steagall. Maek them pay for their subsidies. Let the FDIC go in and clean out the crap and *charge if off*. Let zombie banks be broken up.
No more too big to fail--and no games.
All those academic types.
"Those who can't...teach."
Ummmm, TD.... Ben Dover from Devry is #58, I find it interesting that Eugene Fama and Burton Malkiel are on there as well, fucking schmucks that they are making sure that RIA's never make an effort to *LEARN* and will forever be the fucking idiots who lose the money of retirees
Funny that there are TWO Ben Dover's though, #58 from Devry and #59 from the American Taxpayer Association (Maybe that stands for the rest of us who have no choice and are taking it in the ass)
I'm very upset Andrew Lo is on that list though.
#59 was mine :) You got the jist of it.
This shit's made up -- #172 is from a non-existent university ("University of California at Eugene"). Even if that's a typo and it's supposed to be University of Oregon or UC Irvine, it doesn't explain how there are two people named Ben Dover appearing on the same list. No way any reasonably normal people hadn't got the joke by the time people alive today were born. But, then again, I didn't see Prof. Lou Sass from Sandwich Pants State, so who knows, maybe it's real . . . .
Where is Bernie Madeoff?
You will find most Conservative economists/finance types on the list, those who have a health distrust of government and who value independent policy determinations concerning money supply.
There's a reason why most support this, they understand what will happen otherwise.
What about 172 ?, Wesley Mouch. Ayn Rand's diabolical villain is alive and studying at UC Eugene. Who knew?
In case you've forgotten, Wesley is:
A member of the Looters and, at the beginning of the storyline, the incompetent lobbyist whom Hank Rearden reluctantly employs in Washington. Initially Wesley Mouch is the least powerful and least significant of the Looters - the other members of this group feel they can look down upon him with impunity. Eventually he becomes the most powerful Looter, and the country's economic dictator, thereby illustrating Rand's belief that a government-run economy places too much power in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats who would never have positions of similar influence in a private sector business. His name, appropriately, is evocative of the word "mooch," his modus operandi. Wesley Mouch appears in section 131 and is mentioned in section 161. (wikipedia)
Where's Click and Clack (the Tappett brothers)?
douchebag roll call right hurr
United bought-out scholars. Ron Paul says so http://tinyurl.com/lr46lq
excellent clip. TD should post it. He takes on GS too.
Is #215 Allen Stanford from the Stanford Group??? I think that just about sums this list up. A great group of people who have nothing but the best interests of the nation at heart!
You will find most Conservative economists/finance types on the list, those who have a health distrust of government and who value independent....Agree
You mean a healthy distrust? yes, the fed is behind these problerm. I agree.good finance articles
That memo obviously never made it south of the Mason Dixon Line.
A superb Honour Roll of Idiots!
No, Andrew Lo is not an idiot, that's why I'm so disappointed in his name being on that list.
Are they going to have a song, you know, like USA for Africa?
"We are the New World Order,
We are the banksters,
We are the ones who rob you blind,
So you best start giving,
There's a choice we're making,
Best cover your behind..."
The latest list has over 360 names. They did remove "Sir" Allen from it as expected, but they added Lawrence Yun from the NAR. That's enough to make the whole list null and void.
I saw Mark Thoma on the list.
Economists’ Pro-Fed Petition Discredits Its Signers
by Robert Higgs
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=2787#comment-29759
A passel of bigwig economists has signed a petition urging Congress and the executive branch “to reaffirm their support for and defend the independence of the Federal Reserve System as a foundation of U.S. economic stability.” In support of this defense of the Fed against those now challenging the secrecy of its undertakings and, in some cases, its very existence, these economists offer three arguments.
First, “central bank independence has been shown to be essential for controlling inflation.” A little difficulty for this claim, however, resides in the undeniable fact that for more than a century before the Fed’s establishment, the purchasing power of the dollar fluctuated around an approximately horizontal trend line—that is, despite inflations and deflations usually associated with the wartime issuance of fiat money and the postwar return to specie-backed currency, the dollar more or less retained its exchange value against goods and services over the long run, whereas since the Fed’s establishment the dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its purchasing power. If this post-1913 experience is what these economists consider “controlling inflation,” I would not want to see what happens to a currency’s purchasing power when inflation is not controlled! It seems that the petitioning economists have placed the performance bar absurdly low in their judgment of the Fed’s containment of inflation. Evidently, barring a Weimar-Germany-style hyperinflation, they suppose that everything is hunky-dory on the monetary front.
Second, say our esteemed economists, “lender of last resort decisions should not be politicized.” This statement only goes to prove that, as everybody knew already, economists make terrible comedians: the statement is obviously a joke, but it’s just not funny. “Not be politicized,” they say? What is one to call the Fed’s decisions during the past year to dole out trillions in loans, credit lines, guarantees, asset exchanges, and so forth to the big boys on Wall Street? Are we supposed to believe that all those big investment banks that were permitted to transform themselves instantaneously into depository institutions, thereby gaining access to various forms of Treasury and Fed support, were selected and accommodated on purely disinterested grounds? Or may we be permitted to imagine that institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley just might—might, I said—enjoy a tad more political coziness with the government in general and the Fed in particular than, say, you and I and another three hundred million Americans do?
Finally, the leading economists declare: “The democratic legitimacy of the Federal Reserve System is well established by its legal mandate and by the existing appointments process. Frequent communication with the public and testimony before Congress ensure Fed accountability.” But legitimacy, it would seem, properly lies in the eyes of the legitimizer, not in the tables, charts, and econometric exercises of top-tier academic economists. The Fed’s appointment process, as I see it, suggests more the co-conspiratorial character of the ruling elites than anything we might grace with the adjective “democratic.” And if frequent congressional testimony by Fed officials, notorious for its mumbo-jumbo lack of clarity and definiteness, suffices to “ensure Fed accountability,” then we are left to wonder what led Senator Byron Dorgan to complain on the floor of the Senate on February 3: “We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country. Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. . . . When? Why?” Indeed, the lack of Fed transparency and accountability has been so outrageous during the past year that it has prompted nearly three hundred members of the House of Representatives to support Congressman Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed.
All in all, the economists’ petition reflects the astonishing political naïvité and historical myopia that now characterize the top echelon of the mainstream economics profession. (I prefer this interpretation to the more conspiratorial one that they are fronting for the Fed in order to reap some form of personal gain. Academic economists are more often obtuse than evil.) Everybody now understands that economic central planning is doomed to fail; the problems of cost calculation and producer incentives intrinsic to such planning are common fodder even for economists in upscale institutions. Yet, somehow, these same economists seem incapable of understanding that the Fed, which is a central planning body working at the very heart of the economy—its monetary order—can produce money and set interest rates better than free-market institutions can do so. It is high time that they extended their education to understand that central planning does not work—indeed, cannot work—any better in the monetary order than it works in the economy as a whole.
It is also high time that the Fed be not only audited and required to reveal its inner machinations to the people who suffer under its misguided actions, but abolished root and branch before it inflicts further centrally planned disaster on the world’s people.
http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=2787#comment-29759