The Federal Reserve has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive interest rate hikes designed to, as Chair Jerome Powell said, “get wages down and then get inflation down.” The Fed’s own research has warned that its aggressive policy mirrors a similar one that caused a “severe recession” under Paul Volcker in the 1980s, as The Intercept recently reported. Even the United Nations, which recently warned that the Fed’s rate hikes risk “inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.” Yet President Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has declined to publicly criticize the Fed, saying after it began hiking rates earlier this year that he would “respect the Fed’s independence.”
Besides setting monetary policy, the Fed is also tasked with regulating commercial banks. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., opposed Powell’s nomination by both Trump in 2018 and Biden in 2021 due to what she considered his weak position on banking regulations. “Powell will roll back critical rules that help guard against another financial crisis — and that is simply a risk we cannot afford,” Warren said in a floor speech.
Paid lobbyists make their case on behalf of massive financial corporations in the same fashion as K Street lobbyists hawking their wares to members of Congress. In 2022 alone, over 120 groups reported lobbying the Fed on issues ranging from credit card fees to cryptocurrency to sprawling monetary policy initiatives such as mortgage finance. Postings on the Federal Reserve website in the past year record meetings with Discover Financial, Student Loan Servicing Alliance, National Bankers Association, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. (U.S. banks saw their profits rise 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2022 because of the rate hikes, though profits were still down year over year.)
“The Fed has a history of caving to corporate special interests, and I’ve loudly warned about the dangers of financial deregulation under Chair Powell that risk Americans’ economic security,” Warren told The Intercept.
Like their congressional counterparts, many of the lobbyists seeking to influence the Federal Reserve spent time in government before joining their respective firms. The agencies that served as training grounds for Fed lobbyists include the departments of Defense and Energy, but also financial regulatory agencies like the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve itself.
Bill Nelson — executive vice president and chief economist of one of the largest bank lobby groups, the Bank Policy Institute, or BPI — served as deputy director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve where he attended Federal Open Markets Committee meetings and briefed the Board of Governors. He now lobbies the Federal Reserve on behalf of the same banks that the Fed is charged with regulating.
According to three former BPI employees, the organization regularly hosts unreported meetings where Fed officials are provided ample time to discuss policy with members of the lobbying organization.
“When you have Fed officials sitting next to JPMorgans and Wells Fargos at these BPI events, do you really think the interests of communities are being represented? They are a very lethal force. Look at mortgage rates today, do you really think those rates are a result of the pending recession? This is a machine working hand in hand to generate profit on their own balance sheets. Everyone is serving their own interests,” Marshall Bornemann, a former employee of the Financial Services Roundtable, which later merged with The Clearing House Association to become BPI, told The Intercept. Three former BPI employees who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal confirmed that unreported conversations through informal channels abound between BPI members and Federal Reserve officials.
“These types of meetings between Fed members and BPI are totally in violation of the Fed’s own communication policy,” former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm told The Intercept.
BPI acknowledged its lobbying activity. “Like other industries, the banking industry regularly engages with its regulators,” Sean Oblack, head of communications for BPI, told The Intercept in an email. “For its part, BPI employs subject matter experts on topics from sanctions enforcement to cybersecurity to money markets, and our economists, analysts and attorneys maintain an open dialogue with policymakers who care about developments in those areas.”
The conventional wisdom is that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution dispassionately pursuing its mandate to maximize employment and stabilize prices for the betterment of the country. But since its inception, big banks have tried to influence the Fed to their liking.
In the aftermath of Dodd-Frank — legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to create greater oversight on banks — federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission began publicly listing their meetings with stakeholders in an effort to increase transparency and public trust in their oversight efforts. But even now, so little is publicly known about the kinds of outside pressure the Federal Reserve is subjected to that multiple experts contacted for this story were unaware that lobbying was even permitted.
Scandals involving insider trading and unreported meetings between Fed officials and major financial services groups are baked into the foundation of the Federal Reserve as a system created by and for bankers.
by Daniel Boguslaw, Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images
