Political Quotes

“I thank the ranking member for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to the legislation designed to chip away at the independence of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve's objectives of maximum employment and stable prices have and will remain moving targets. The legislation attacks the independent judgment of the Fed in a number of ways by intrusive and dangerous meddling in the guise of Congressional oversight. This legislation also suggests that this complex task could somehow be reduced to a function of two variables. Now, I am a physicist and, as Albert Einstein said: ``Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler.'' In reality, economics is a field of study that is constrained by numbers, but within those constraints, there lie large psychological variables and many external, often international, and often random variables. It is obvious that any two-variable rule is far too simple to guide the monetary policy of a $17 trillion national economy interconnected with the economies in every part of the world. It is also clear from the incoherent and counterfactual tirades that we listen to in our committee after the Republican financial collapse of 2007, that we want to keep politics as far away as possible from Federal Reserve monetary policy. The truth is that Federal monetary policy is already guided, but not determined, by a number of complex, macroeconomic models. It is very far from ad hoc.…”