Roger Altman Quotes
The Fed is the major U.S. firefighter. It's not the Treasury. It's not the Congress. We certainly saw that vividly in 2008.
Altman, Roger. Interview on Squawk Box. CNBC, NBCUniversal, 16 Dec. 2015.
This is an oft quoted statement because of the Great Depression which occurred the following year after Strong had passed away. The Federal Reserve followed the lead of President Hoover and did nothing while they watched the nation’s money supply shrink a third over the next 3 years, making a business comeback very difficult. If Strong had lived longer, he might have persuaded the others to increase the money supply and act as the nation’s safety valve. As the President of the New York Bank, he was the first among equals.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, creatively found alternatives that the Fed had never used before and almost all experts did not even realize that were possible. He and Treasury Secretary Paulson, almost certainly saved the American system of capitalism. But in the process, they in the early stages and Bernanke throughout the crisis took a number of steps to save the system where the very people and companies whose actions had triggered the entire crisis seemed to personally benefit while most Americans were hurt badly and none of them received any immediate personal benefits the way the large bankers did. The amount of money that Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Board associates spend was staggeringly large and that too distressed many Americans. Almost all of the money was actually returned to the taxpayers as a result of the work of the Fed and the Treasury officials, but no one could feel good about the unfair disparity that had so benefitted much of Wall Street particularly and Main Street and the rest of American only generally while so many lost their jobs, their homes, their dignity and their hopes. Only the big banks and bankers also got a personal huge windfall of taxpayer money and took no risk for that. The alternative would have ruined everyone and even have been worse for the average citizen.
The ‘Fed’ refers to the Federal Reserve Board, the strength of which lies in its independence from politics. Some, however, believe that there should not be any entity that performs a major function in our society which is not accountable to the Executive Branch or the Congress or both.
In 1979 the Federal Reserve reported the national money supply and made a reporting and arithmetical error that was just short of $3 billion.
Prior to that the practice of the Fed was simply to make interest rate and other decisions and never discuss or explain anything. And they never tried to use words to try and change economic behavior. See {639156} for the Fed Chairman’s practice. However in 2001 that changed and they used language to shape investor and consumer behavior.
Roger Charles Altman is an American investment banker, the founder and senior chairman of Evercore, and a former Democratic politician. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration from January 1977 until January 1981 and as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration from January 1993 until he resigned in August 1994, amid the Whitewater controversy.
