Does anyone actually care since the Austrian objection is to the entirety of central banking and credit expansion, something which will undoubtedly continue or maybe even increase as a result of the bill?
I feel as though the entire thing is a waste of time. I’m glad that the Fed’s getting a little bit more attention, as is Ron Paul, but the fact is that this simply removes one more objection against the Fed (the lack of oversight from DEMOCRACY!!!111) while doing little to actually limit the implicit damage that the federal reserve can do. It could theoretically prevent a certain amount of handshaking between the fed and big banks, but I see just as much if not more potential for the fed to come under the influence of political pressure by politicians who don’t even have the qualification of having some economic knowledge. Giving the fed over to the politicians could well be worse than keeping it independent, and there’s not too much of a gap between auditing the fed and doing just that.
At any rate, you can run a circus around empricial evidence involving bank and money statistics without ever getting to the heart of the matter. If they find anything wrong in the fed’s books or aggregious in its actions then they’ll just use the oppurtunity to, well, nationalize the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States!
Let’s say that the fed is charged with criminal activity, well then what? It will be nothing more than an excuse to put both banks and the federal reserve under a greater amount of government control.
@ Aristophanes
Remember that a full audit wouldn’t necessarily mean full disclosure, or at least not immediately. It could well be done in a closed manner… But then again we’re talking about the government so they’re probably going to f*** it up no matter what way they do it.