To Treat the Fed as Volcker Did - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

The NY Times points to an interesting BreakingViews article on the fed. Short version: The Fed is trying to do too much and some of the things (example maximum employment and stable prices) are seemingly at odds. A possible solution? Simplify it and have the Fed worry only about stable prices.

From the Fed's own website:

"...the Federal Reserve's duties fall into four general areas:

• conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates
• supervising and regulating banking institutions to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers
• maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets
• providing financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments system"

From the NY Times: To Treat the Fed as Volcker Did - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times:

"The president-elect should change the Fed’s legal structure and mandate so that it will maintain monetary stability, even if a person of Mr. Volcker’s stature is not running it, Breakingviews says. The objective should be to force even the feeblest political appointee to keep broad monetary growth in line with the growth of the economy. That means raising interest rates as high as necessary to keep consumer and asset price inflation low, it says."