2024-03-25
54 分钟Welcome to Macro musings, where each week we pull back the curtain and take a closer look at the most important macroeconomic issues of the past, present and future.
I am your host, David Beckworth, a senior research fellow with the Mercator center at George Mason University.
And I'm glad you decided to join us.
Our guests today are Andrew Levin and Christina Parajohn Skinner.
Andy is a professor of economics at Dartmouth University and a former senior staffer at the Federal Reserve Board of governors.
Christina is a legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and formerly was a legal counsel to the bank of England.
Andy and Christina have co authored a new article titled Central Bank Undersight, assessing the Fed's accountability to Congress, and they join us today to discuss this paper.
Welcome back, Andy and Christina.
Thanks for having us.
David.
Well, this was a very interesting article to read, and some might call it provocative because in the very title it says central bank undersight as opposed to oversight, which is what you guys are getting at.
So I'm curious to hear the motivation for this very, for some provocative paper.
Yes.
Well, I guess you can say that with our title, we're certainly not bearing the lead, are we?
Right.
So, you know, I think it's really helpful probably for the listeners to start out with very big picture, and then we can talk about our respective motivations for coming together and collaborating on this project.
Big picture.
The question that we're trying to get at here is whether Congress's oversight tools, capacity, attention are really fit for purpose for overseeing a modern Fed, a central bank.
That's really changed a lot in the past 15 years.
Is Congress still thinking about Fed oversight like it did in the nineties or in the early odds?