By Dan Kervick
The Federal Reserve is the central bank of what is still the world’s most important economy, and its Board of Governors is responsible for regulating and stabilizing the financial engine of US capitalism. But to much of the world, that engine now appears to be both poorly designed and overhyped. The global economy has yet to emerge from its most devastating financial failure since the Great Depression. The hub of that radial disaster was Wall Street and the United States, where a combination of botched corporate governance, derelict regulators, open corruption, unhinged greed and sheer, manic stupidity helped run much of the developed world’s economic system into the ground. The economic model that for a brief period during the last two decades of the 20th century struck many as a shiny modern marvel of economic engineering now exhibits the corroded aspect of a shoddy and dangerous lemon hawked by fly-by-night hustlers to a world of ingenuous chumps. Continue reading
