2013-06-03

Cato: Ohio Merits a Seat on the Fed

1946. That is the last time someone from the Cleveland Fed district was a member of the Federal Reserve Board. Section 10 of the Federal Reserve Act requires that, in regard to members of the board, “not more than one of whom shall be selected from any one Federal Reserve district,” the presi dent’s selections “shall have due regard to a fair representation of… geographical divisions of the country.”
In plain English, this means you cannot have more than one Fed governor from the same Fed district.
Jeremy Stein and Jerome Powell were recently sworn in as members of the Board of Gov ernors of the Federal Reserve System. According to his paperwork, submitted to the Senate, Professor Stein is from Massachusetts. Current Fed governor Dan Turullo is also from Massachusetts. Mr. Powell is from Maryland, as is current governor Sarah Bloom Raskin. Their advancements meet neither the letter nor the spirit of the law.
If we ever hope to break the Federal Reserve free of the outsized influence of Wall Street, nominations have to come from outside the financial strongholds of the Northeast. A good place to start looking is America’s industrial heartland, particularly Ohio, the seat of the Cleveland Fed.

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