Want to bet it will not make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate?Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is scared shitless about this bill and is predicting dire consequences in an attempt to stop this audit.
From The Hill:
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) won a rare legislative victory on Wednesday when the House passed his legislation allowing for a full audit of the Federal Reserve, including an audit of the Fed’s monetary policy decisions.
The House approved Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act, H.R. 459, in a bipartisan 327-98 vote. The vote split Democrats almost evenly — 89 for and 97 against — while only one Republican, Rep. Robert Turner (R-N.Y.), voted against it.
The bill won an easy majority, given its 270 cosponsors, and easily cleared the two-thirds majority needed for passage, which was required because it was considered under a suspension of the rules.
Paul, who has yet to officially drop out of the 2012 presidential race, has long sought to dismantle the Fed based on arguments that the Fed’s power to create money has devalued the dollar. He also says the Fed hurts Americans by making them vulnerable to Fed-induced housing and stock market bubbles, and more recently, that the Fed reacted to the recession by creating billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions.
But with little appetite in Congress to abolish the Fed, Paul is hoping that increasing the transparency of the Fed’s monetary policy decision-making process can at least give Americans more understanding of the decisions it makes.
“The bill essentially removes the prohibitions against a full audit,” Paul said during Tuesday’s debate on the bill. He was referring to current rules that allow the Government Accountability Office to audit most aspects of the Fed, but not monetary policy decisions.
“To audit, we should know what kind of transactions there are,” Paul said. “We should know about the deals that they made when they were fixing the price of LIBOR. These are the kinds of things that have gone on for years that we have no access to.”
