Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor for the Financial Times, reflects on conflicting views expressed by Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Federal Reserve, when it comes to what action the Fed should take to boost the economy.
“To pretend the Fed is somehow divorced from politics, or divorced from Treasury operations and things like that, is a bit of a fiction,” Tett says. “Frankly, the fact we’ve seen this dissent inside the Fed indicates that not only are economists right now in uncharted territory — nobody really knows what the impact of this quantitative easing really is or is not — but it also indicates the scale of the political polarization in the country and the degree of policy debate that’s going on even amongst supposed neutral bureaucrats about what the best course of action is.”
