Thomas Palley

Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Richard Clarida has shot himself in the foot with what appears to be insider trading. That comes on the heels of prior concerns about inappropriate trading by regional Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren. Albeit unintentionally, the good news is these indiscretions may have done working families a favor by helping disprove the notion of central bank independence.

For years, many of us have argued that central bank independence is a charade aimed at facilitating control over central banks by financial interests. Here is a link to an article of mine titled “Central Bank Independence: A Rigged Debate Based on False Politics and Economics”.

In that paper I wrote every central banker “inevitably brings her own preferences, views, and prejudices to the policy table (p.77)”.  The implication is clear: appoint people with a Wall Street background and they will bring Wall Street policy preferences; appoint well-to-do financial economists with large stock portfolios and they will bring a personal concern with the stock market and asset prices.

Federal Reserve Presidents and Governors tend to be drawn from the banking community, Wall Street, and neoliberal academic economists. For decades, activists have requested that they be drawn from a broader political economic swathe of society to give working families better representation, but that request has been dismissed as lacking justification.

The Clarida-Kaplan-Rosengren affair argues otherwise. It is suggestive of how private interests are always in the room. It is also indicative of why handing the keys of the central bank to so-called independent bankers does not magically solve the problematic of monetary policy decision making, which is why analytical diversity is a matter of public import.

Messrs. Clarida, Kaplan, and Rosengren will survive and prosper. Wall Street will also continue to taint policymaking via its pre-pensation/post-pensation incentive model. The silver lining in the episode is the opportunity to bury the ideological doctrine of central bank independence and open the Federal Reserve to a broader set of ideas and personnel.

This paper explores the economics and political economy of financialization using Matt Taibbi’s vampire squid metaphor to characterize it. The paper makes five innovations. First, it focuses on the mechanics of the “vampire squid” process whereby financialization rotates through the economy loading sector balance sheets with debt. Second, it identifies the critical role of government budget deficits for the financialization process. Third, it identifies the critical role of central banks, which are the lynchpin of the system and now serve as de facto guarantors of the value and liquidity of private sector liabilities. Fourth, the paper argues financialization imposes a form of policy lock-in. Fifth, it argues financialization transforms popular attitudes and understandings, thereby generating political support despite poor economic outcomes. In effect, there is a politics of financialization that goes hand-in-hand with the economics. The paper concludes with some observations on why mainstream macroeconomics has no equivalent construct to financialization and discusses the disquieting unexplored terrain that the economy is now in.

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