Excellent post, that I agree with, by Brad DeLong on the Fed, Bernie Sanders' amendment to the Dodd financial regulation bill, calling for regular GAO audits of the Feds deliberations and communications related to setting and implementing, and transactions implementing, monetary policy.

Delong writes "...I am willing to defer to President Obama's judgment that the Federal Reserve's desire for a modicum of central banker privilege is worth respecting, and that the Sanders amendment is the wrong treatment for the disease. I am willing to do so, in large part, because I think the problems are not those that detailed routine investigations of staff communications would solve: the staff of the Federal Reserve do, it seems to me, overwhelmingly have a reality-based vision of the economy, conduct thorough and appropriate analyses of risks and scenarios, and understand the Federal Reserve's dual mandate."

The problem according to Brad is rather that "I do not think that the dominant views of monetary policy in the FOMC right now are informed by American values and a reality-based assessment of the state of the economy.  [...] a good many of the people speaking and voting in the FOMC are the wrong people".

And Obama hasn't done enough to fix this, with five of the seven seats on the Fed's Board of Governors that have opened up while he's been president still unfilled (and one filled by reappointing Ben Bernanke, a decent centrist choice who Brad thinks shouldn't be the left wing of the FOMC at this point.

Too much conventional supposedly-conservative "wisdom", in other words, too much coziness with financial institutions and, I guess, too much worry about inflation even in the depths of recession, from this Fed Board.

Weighing on the other side of the Sanders amendment issue, perhaps, is this via Paul Krugman.