Rand Paul

I find it rather fascinating that we are talking about where the regulations will go, whether it is going to be in the Fed or a new agency.

No other industry has that much power to select its regulators.

It is absurd to have a government agency with this kind of power be the agency immune from such audits.

This is an affront to the Constitution which will be exacerbated if we transfer more power to the Federal Reserve without mandating that all its Governors be appointees of those who are elected by the voters.

But here in this country, if you happen to want to use silver and gold as legal tender, you go to jail.

The middle class gets wiped out because the value goes down.

Who suffers? The consumer, the people who lose their jobs, the poor people, the middle class.

The Federal Reserve is hardly a protector of the consumer when it distorts the interest rate that is paid to the savers.

The systematic destruction of the value of our money has not helped our consumers; our consumers are destroyed by the loss of their purchasing power.

But when you prop-up policies that are bad, ultimately the consumer is hurt by these regulations because the market doesn't hold them in check.

I am concerned about the history of regulation. We don't have a real good record that regulations prevent problems.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for holding these hearings because I think they are very important.

The Fed is a government unto itself. You know, they hire and make their wages and it doesn't go through the ordinary process.

Didn't you find out that we are not supposed to do that around here? We don't have that much concern about it.

So transparency, how can you be against transparency? But I believe the Congress would be more effective in its oversight of the Federal Reserve if it concentrated much more on outcomes and much less on process.

Now it sounded to me like the majority here is for independence, which is a code word for secrecy and in opposition to transparency.

For me, independent usually is a code word for 'secret,' so we can't get the information.

We shouldn't be afraid of the truth.

They don't want to make it a political football.

We have an obligation, a moral obligation, here in the Congress to know exactly what the agreements are.

There is a strong argument now that the more we know about what has been going on in this last year, the more it would have helped the markets.

We just want to know what is going on and why and the discussions.

A lot of us think of independence--we put another word in there automatically, that means 'secret' and 'clandestine' and 'serving special interests.'

We need to end the bailouts in which the Fed has been instrumental, I think, in carrying out over the last 18 months.

I believe if we continue to do these things, continue to have stimulus packages and deficits, we are going to have crippling inflation.