Bernanke to Engage in Another Illegal Power Grab

by Matt Stoller [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

Ben Bernanke's Fed today announced it's going to start buying short term commercial paper.  The commercial paper market is normally used to fund solid corporate activity, but in the last few years it has become rife with questionable financing operations.  

One tiny problem is that it's not legal for the Fed to do this (read Secrets of the Temple for a great book on how secretive and powerful the Fed really is).  Another tiny problem is that this plan by the Fed is probably larger than the $700 billion bailout, and there's no Congressional authorization for any of this.  Yet another tiny problem is that it's not going to restore confidence to the market.

But the possibility of propping up the vast market for commercial paper could represent an undertaking even broader than the Treasury Department's plan to buy as much as $700 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

In statements on Monday morning, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury said they were "consulting with market participants on ways to provide additional support for term unsecured funding markets."

By referring to "unsecured funding markets," policy makers signaled that they wanted to intervene directly in the credit markets. Officials said on Monday evening that they wanted to finish a plan as quickly as possible, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

But the effort is fraught with legal complexities. Though the Federal Reserve has sweeping power to create money and lend it out, experts said it was normally prohibited from buying assets that could lose money.

One way around that legal limitation would be to provide money to a separate legal entity that would do the buying and investing on the Fed's behalf. That would be similar to Maiden Lane Funding L.L.C., a special-purpose entity that officials created last spring to hold $29 billion in hard-to-sell securities from Bear Stearns.

But so far, the myriad efforts by government regulators to shore up confidence have seemed to yield little relief among investors, some of whom believed the actions have taken on a haphazard air.

"People are slowly but surely coming to the realization that playing 'Whack-a-Mole' with each of these issues as they arise, on an ad hoc basis, doesn't get the job done," said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm in San Francisco.

Bernanke needs to resign.  He's got a year left on his term, but he should go before then.