I have been reading Frederic Mishkin’s Financial Markets and Institutions, and Mishkin is a man on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.
On the section that deals with the Federal Reserve and other central banks, he says that there are two theories about Federal Reserve insiders - the bureaucratic behaviour theory and the public interest theory.
The bureaucratic behaviour theory says that bureaucrats have self-interests like everybody else, and use their power accordingly. He calls this view “too extreme”, and reconciles it with the public interest theory by saying, “Although I have self-interest, that does not mean I can’t be altruistic.”
He does this after admitting that the Federal Reserve is as independent as a private business, but with statutory powers - a private business that rakes in $18 billion in profits a year from its interest rate and monetary policy activities - and he says that all of this is done in altruism.
This is such an intellectually lightweight and feeble defense of one’s work: “You must trust me, because I am an altruist”. This coming from a financial economist.
You don’t have to even know economics to know this is garbage. Of course, much in this book is garbage, like the championing of the efficient markets hypothesis, with the claim that you can’t make money from technical analysis…even though me and my father made a lot of money from technical analysis.