On the recordJuly 24, 2012
To illustrate the misconceptions about this bill, let's refer to what the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Chaffetz) had to say. He said 76 percent of the purchasers of this and that. Well, if they were so nontransparent, I don't know how he would know that. He didn't have a subpoena. But the fact is, yes, he knows that because of the transparency we've already built in. But all the more important, the details, the specifics of every one of those transactions are already public. This isn't about those transactions or about with whom they were done and under what time period. It's about the motives of the people setting monetary policy. And let me address the Constitution. Yes, it is true that the Constitution gives us the power to do this. The Constitution gives us a lot of power. It gives us power to declare war on Canada. It gives us the power to do a lot of things. Wise people pick and choose which powers they use. But this is not about getting more information about their transactions. All of that is out there. This is an effort to give politicians, a wonderful group of people of which I am one, more direct involvement in the actual decisions on setting of interest rates than is good for the economy.
