This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 17, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Republicans are pushing legislation they hope will rein in the Federal Reserve, an agency that has taken upon itself broad new powers in the last few years.

Mark Calabria directs the Cato Institute's Financial Regulation Studies,

evaluates the push for Fed transparency and audits.

So we've got a combination of it is a hundred years, so it is the anniversary,

and so I do think that there's a sense of let's take a look back and see how successful

the 100 years have been.

More importantly, there is a sense of that the Federal Reserve policies both contributed to the boom and bus that led to the

financial crisis but are also contributing to the weak economy we have today.

So rightly or wrongly I think the general public and politicians attention to the Fed is more driven by the state of the economy than anything else.

All right, but specifically the last six years of Fed policy have been

Stridently different. They have been very unusual by historical standards that is very true. So certainly in

about 10 years ago leading to the housing bubble we had very loose monetary

policy and that's looked as a contributor. During the financial crisis you had an

array of assistance programs that were set up and bailouts that I think quite frankly

shock the public.

I think much of the public understood that the Fed set interest rates.

The public did not necessarily know that the Fed could essentially bail out institutions

like AIG.

And so I think that really became a shock.

And you also saw a tremendous amount of pushback from the Fed toward any efforts at accountability in terms of transparency.

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