HuffPost-

The Federal Reserve can’t stop hiring Goldman Sachs executives. On Monday, the Dallas Fed named former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Robert Kaplan as its president — a post with significant regional regulatory responsibilities and influence over critical monetary policy decisions.

Kaplan will serve on the the powerful Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates that have a massive impact on economic growth, unemployment and inflation. He’ll also be a major regulator. Kaplan has been critical of the regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis, saying that the Wall Street reform law passed by Congress is hurting small businesses.

“My complaint about Dodd-Frank is that it should be slimmed down and focused on two or three top priorities,” Kaplan told The American Interest in 2012. During the same interview, Kaplan hinted that he’d be willing to end the Fed’s historic eight-year adherence to zero interest rate policy, saying that “what the Fed thinks it has been doing over the past three years [2009-2012] is what the ECB is now doing for Germany and Europe: buying them time, and hopefully putting on the pressure for [fiscal policy-makers] to get in gear because they can’t keep on indefinitely with hyper-aggressive monetary policy.”

[HUFFINGTON POST]

Comments

comments