Will The Fed Get Too Much Power?

Clearly with the financial meltdown experienced during the past year, too little regulation is a bad thing. However, the same could be said of too much regulation.

Some concerns have been raised after President Obama stated that new rules will try to eliminate the kind of excessive risk-taking by financial institutions that proved “very dangerous to the American people.” In the President’s speech tomorrow, he will propose that the Federal Reserve take on the mantle of the US financial “Super Cop.”

Currently the Fed is the country’s central bank. However, if the Fed’s focus was expanded to also supervise large financial institutions considered “too big to fail” (ala American International Group (AIG)) in order to prevent another financial meltdown, some assert that it might end up turning the Federal Reserve into an all-powerful entity that could in all eventuality slow down a major overhaul of banking and market regulations.

One that is opposed to the expansion of the Fed’s focus is Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Banking Committee. Mr. Dodd advocates an alternative plan to strip the Fed of its regulatory role entirely and create a new consolidated bank regulator that would assume the roles that the Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. which presently play in the role of helping to regulate state-chartered banks. The Fed would then focus on its existing mission as the nation’s central bank — setting monetary policy and acting as a “lender of last resort.”

What also seems to concern Democrats and Republicans alike that expanding the Fed’s responsibilities and increasing government spending pose a greater potential as a significant source of “systemic risk to our nation’s economy than the failure of any specific financial institution.”

We would expect some of the special interests and lobbyists for financial institutions such as, but not limited to, Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) will be working overtime in the coming weeks.

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