Slate - Eliot Spitzer on the expanding role of the Fed

The Federal Reserve Bank has managed through most of its history to reside in obscurity—little understood, rarely questioned, viewed as hovering above the political fray, the domain of technocrats and erudite economists. That should all change.

The Fed's power over all things economic is hard to overstate, and it now desires even more, seeking the title of "systemic risk regulator." Some of us have argued that regulators—and the Fed in particular—have had virtually all the power they needed to avert the economic traumas we have been living through: They just failed to use it. Yet the proposed formalization of the Fed's mega-regulator role requires that we lift the veil that has shielded it from scrutiny for too long.