Notice & Comment

Symposium on Peter Conti-Brown's The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve

Notice & Comment

Symposium Recap on Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve

Earlier this month we hosted a terrific online symposium reviewing my co-blogger Peter Conti-Brown’s important new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, which was recently published by the Princeton University Press. The contributions to the symposium were diverse and thought-provoking. For ease of reference, I thought I’d include links to all of […]

Notice & Comment

The Administrative Law of the Federal Reserve: The Path Ahead

What a pleasure it has been to read these reviews. As I set out to write The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , this very audience—serious scholars and practitioners of administrative law who had thought hard about institutional design in other contexts besides the Fed—weighed heavily as one of the primary groups of […]

Notice & Comment

Zeitgeists: The Federal Reserve in its Evolving Regulatory Context

Readers are hard to please. It is bad enough that we criticize books that we could not even begin to write. But even worse, when an author has penned something that we like, all too often our response is not “thank you” but rather “more please”—and sometimes we don’t say “please.” I confess that after […]

Notice & Comment

The Call of the Siren and Federal Agency Independence: Independence from Whom?, by Anna Williams Shavers

When an independent agency is created, from whom does it gain independence – the President, Congress, or the people? Maybe the better question is whether it is really independent at all. One thing in particular that caught my eye is Peter Conti-Brown’s focus in Part III on the independence of the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) […]

Notice & Comment

Four Comments on Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, by Marshall Breger

I join my fellow colleagues in praising Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. The book provides an insightful history of the Federal Reserve since its 1913 inception and is a powerful account of the extent to which “personnel is policy.” In particular, I note his nuanced understanding of “agency independence” as […]

Notice & Comment

Of Independence, Sovereignty, Accountability, and Other Sleights of Hand

Administrative law doctrine and scholarship has traditionally treated agencies as unitary entities and focused upon the proper allocation of authority among agencies, the President, Congress, and the courts. Recently, however, scholars have begun to unlock the “black box” of agency design to identify and evaluate the ways in which administrative law rules allocate decisionmaking authority […]

Notice & Comment

The Fed Knows Prices, But the Founders Knew Real Values

Peter Conti-Brown’s terrific study of the Federal Reserve arrives amid a small boomlet—I won’t say “bubble”—of new books on our central bank: Roger Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve; former Chairman Bernanke’s memoir, The Courage to Act; similar memoirs by former Chairman Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Geithner; Philip Wallach’s […]

Notice & Comment

The Fed (Like Soylent Green) Is Made of People, by Emily S. Bremer

My thanks to Chris Walker for organizing this symposium and inviting me to participate. It’s a pleasure to be involved and an honor to be among such an impressive line-up of scholars and experts. Like yesterday morning’s contributor, Sam Halabi, the Federal Reserve System is not my area of expertise, but I very much enjoyed […]

Notice & Comment

Independent From Whom? The Federal Reserve and the Freemasons

There is a rumor out there (which may have just started with this post) that one out of every thirteen copies of Peter Conti-Brown’s new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve includes a chapter exploring how over the last century the Freemasons have influenced and in some respect controlled the form and […]

Notice & Comment

Conti-Brown’s “Independence” and Institutional Design: Lessons from and for the FDA, by Sam Halabi

Let me begin by echoing Daniel’s thanks to Chris, the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment team, and Peter for the opportunity to reach outside my scholarly comfort zone and hopefully play a useful role in illuminating the importance of Peter’s book not only for scholars of the Federal Reserve system but the legal […]

Notice & Comment

Introduction: Symposium on Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve

I’m excited to announce that over the next week or so we will be hosting an online symposium reviewing my co-blogger Peter Conti-Brown’s important new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , which was just published by the Princeton University Press. Here’s an overview of the book from the publisher’s website: The […]

Notice & Comment

Maybe the Federal Reserve Banks Are Constitutional After All, by Daniel Hemel

Thanks to Chris Walker for organizing this online symposium, to the editors of the Yale Journal on Regulation for hosting it on their site, and—most of all—to Peter Conti-Brown for writing a brilliant book. In this post, I’ll take issue with one of Peter’s conclusions—that “the [Federal] Reserve Banks are almost certainly unconstitutional” (p. 107)—but […]