[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12181-12182]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    FEDERAL RESERVE TRANSPARENCY ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, later today, we will vote on 
H.R. 459, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2012. Because this 
legislation comes to us on the suspension calendar, it will require a 
two-thirds vote in favor of passage.
  I rise today in support of a full audit of the Federal Reserve. I 
have thought for many years that there's too much secrecy and too much 
power vested in our Federal Reserve. This is an effort that I first 
joined in June of 1991, in the 102nd Congress, when I cosponsored a 
bill introduced by Congressman Phil Crane of Illinois to audit the 
Federal Reserve.
  Even back then, before our most recent major financial recession, 
Congressman Crane's bill had 56 bipartisan cosponsors. That support has 
grown over the years, and in the 111th Congress, the last Congress, 
Congressman Ron Paul's ``audit the Fed'' bill gathered an overwhelming 
320 cosponsors from both parties. Now that support, I believe, is at 
270 in this Congress.
  Thomas Jefferson was one of our Founding Fathers who was concerned 
about putting too much power into a central bank, and he wrote in a 
letter in 1816 ``that banking establishments are more dangerous than 
standing armies.'' That was not me; that was Thomas Jefferson.
  Listen to what people are saying about this bill today from both ends 
of the political spectrum.
  Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of Freedom Works, said:

       Many economists have found that the central bank's loose 
     monetary policy played a major role in the current economic 
     crisis. It is more crucial than ever that the Federal 
     Reserve's monetary decisions be examined. Without a 
     comprehensive audit, we will never know how the Fed is 
     manipulating our money behind closed doors.

  The National Taxpayers Union, one of our most respected 
organizations, said:

       American taxpayers deserve to know more about the workings 
     of a government-sanctioned entity whose decisions directly 
     affect their economic livelihood.

  Arnold Kling, an author and scholar at the Cato Institute, said:

       If an audit were to uncover serious flaws and decisions 
     made by the Fed, it is difficult to see why we are better off 
     remaining ignorant of such flaws.

  Journalist and columnist Rick Sanchez said:

       For an entity that wields so much power, we know relatively 
     little about the Fed. Would you trust an unknown banker to 
     decide what happens with your paycheck every week? Why do we 
     accept this for our country?

  And Brent Budowsky, a very liberal political opinion writer, wrote in 
support of an audit and said:

       In my years of experience in politics, media, and business, 
     I have learned that secrecy is usually the enemy of common 
     sense, fairness, and sound policy.

  Another liberal economist, the famous John Maynard Keynes, said this:

       There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the 
     existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

  And a very conservative--one of the most respected conservative 
economists, F.A. Hayek, said this:

       When one studies the history of money, one cannot help 
     wondering why people should have put up for so long with 
     governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years 
     that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.

  I have heard over the years, Mr. Speaker, people say that we need to 
have a Federal Reserve and a Federal Reserve system in order to prevent 
depressions and recessions. Well, that is certainly a very, very dumb 
statement to make because the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and 
16 years later, in 1929, we started our greatest depression. I think we 
have had more recessions and more downturns in the economy since the 
Federal Reserve was created than we ever had in the entire history of 
our country before that system was created.

[[Page 12182]]

  I'm not saying that it is a bad system or that it's wrong to have 
some type of Federal Reserve system, but it certainly is one that 
deserves more attention from the Congress. And surely, it is one that 
has too much secrecy and too much power in this day, and at least the 
Congress needs to look into it more than it has since that system and 
that board was created.

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