The CBC wants Liz to run in 2016.
Via The Week
In 2013 and 2014, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) apparently had more meetings with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen than anyone else in Congress.
According to a story this week in The Hill, the subject of the chats — two phone calls and five meetings — was enforcement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which is designed to prevent another financial crisis. Warren, a liberal populist beloved by the Democratic base, has long been a dogged champion of reining in the banks and the financial industry, and Dodd-Frank gave the Fed a slew of new duties in that area.
But of course, regulation isn’t the Fed’s only policy responsibility. Another one — perhaps the most important one — is monetary policy, which has big consequences for how much the economy delivers for the moneyed elite versus everyday working Americans. Yet Democrats have largely ignored it, and Republicans have ferociously pushed for the Fed to maximize the interests of the rich.
The issue is desperately in need of a populist left-wing champion. Warren should step up.
The Fed’s job is to control the supply of money in the economy. Through a variety of tools, it can increase the supply to boost economic activity and job growth, or pull the supply back to tamp down inflation. There’s an unavoidable trade-off here; the more the Fed does of one, the less it does of the other.[…]
Furthermore, it’s an issue that meshes well with Warren’s penchant for digging into complex regulatory and policy topics, while still being able to clarify why they matter for everyday working Americans. Federal Reserve policy can seem horribly arcane. But what it comes down to is simply this: if the Fed moves its dial in one direction, workers get more help, at the cost of some loss of wealth and power for the upper crust. If it moves it in the other direction, the upper crust benefits, and workers pay the price in lost jobs and lost wage growth.
In recent decades, the Fed’s been moving its dial in that second direction a lot. Which is the kind of thing Elizabeth Warren was placed on this Earth to combat.
HT: Donna Brazile