Karen Petrou: Insider Trading, Insider Talking, and the Consequences of Outsider Wrath
There’s no question that the 2008 crisis was a bit of an embarrassment to everyone in charge no matter what all their memoirs since have said. However, the actual global financial cataclysm was nothing to U.S. voters compared to the torrent of furious protest sparked by Treasury’s maladroit decision to allow top executives at AIG to keep munificent pay raises even though many of them presided over and profited by actions that prompted well over $100 billion in taxpayer bailouts. So it is with the Fed. The looming battle over its billions to big finance companies is, as I detailed last week, a serious structural challenge. But the combination of continuing official trading conflicts and new revelations about closed-door meetings is a lot easier to understand and thus a political killer with immediate consequences for Fed governance when Congress gets around to thinking about things other than itself.
Elizabeth Warren’s already on it. Many will follow her lead not only because they often do, but also because this time she’s mostly right. Even if she weren’t, most people will understand why she was upset by Fed “insider” trading and now by a whole lot of insider talking.
That the St. Louis Fed only says that it needs to “rethink” its policy just throws salt in this gaping political wound. Saying also that the Bank’s president went without compensation to discuss monetary policy behind doors controlled by one of the giant companies it supervises doesn’t come close to countering …