The Fed Is Down
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A good time to remind people that the USA's money-transfer system (aka: ACH) is a giant Rube-Goldberg machine involving FTP transfers of specially formatted files.
So it sounds like the Fed's FTP server is down?? Or something like that?
The Treasury is US Government. But the Fed is owned by the member banks. The US kinda coopted a seat at their table and Congress + President appoints the Fed head. But otherwise, the rest of the board is made up by private companies.
Yes, it shares some power with the banks it regulates (who can elect representatives), but the US government didn't "coopt a seat at the table." It built the table and had most of the seats from the start.
And it's true that member banks own stock in the Fed, but it's a super-funky kind of stock ownership. That stock can't be sold or traded, and doesn't grant the kind of voting rights one normally associates with stock ownership. It only entitles the stockholder to their share of the dividends the Fed pays every year. The Fed actually returns nearly all of its profits (something like 95%) to the US Treasury, and pays the rest as dividends to shareholder banks.
Jefferson wanted one system, Hamilton wanted another. And the two sides have been arguing for the past 200+ years. Sometimes, the central bank appears, sometimes it disappears. Then silver+gold, then removal of the silver standard (gold-only standard), then etc. etc. etc.
The Revolutionary War required money and bonds. Immediately upon the end of that war came the question of how to organize and pay those loans. Should it be held by the states? Or by the national government? Should a central bank even exist, or is a loose collection of banks good enough? Should there be a national currency, or should the States make their own currency? The Continental Congress's dollar was hit severely by inflation: losing 99% of its value in just a decade or so. Not a big deal: most Americans used Spanish Pesos back then due to their reliable silver weight.
The money issue was front-and-center at the birth of this country. Lots of debate and discussion (and duels!!) occurred over the issue. Arguing about money (literally to death) is a proud American tradition.
In regard to the parenthetical, the country existed either from the First Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the surrender at Yorktown, but in any case before the adoption of the Constitution, much less Hamilton's appointment under it as the first Secretary of the Treasury, which is a really odd point to chose as the starting point of the nation.
I'd say that what you're describing isn't limited to just fears about money creation, though. It's part of the broader notion in most Western democracies that permanent (or semi-permanent) bureaucrats are more trustworthy than elected officials. It's not just the Fed: Presidents who tamper with the Department of Justice too much, for example, are often criticized for intruding on its "independence."
This notion has both practical problems-- who can fire an "independent" bureaucrat run amok?-- and constitutional problems-- the Constitution says "the Executive power is vested in the President" and makes no allowances for any Executive power to be wielded outside the President's control. The Supreme Court has been known to remind everyone of this fact when it's forgotten. For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a director who is appointed by the President for a 5 year term, and can only be fired for a narrow list of reasons. The Supreme Court struck down that restriction and said, roughly, that any inquiry into why the President is firing a particular bureaucrat would infringe on the Executive power that is vested in the President alone.
Nonetheless, this idea that some power is "too dangerous to be wielded by elected officials" is alive and well, like with the Federal Reserve. It just can't be wielded too far from the President-- and yes, the President can remove members of the Fed Board of Governors, though it isn't commonly done.
The President; “independent” officers and agencies (to the extent that this is a formal distinction, “independence” is often attributed on a softer political basis to regular executive agencies and officers, too) are those who (or, for agencies, whose group of principals are) legally protected against Presidential removal except for specified cause.
And also Congress, as such officers are civil officers subject to impeachment.
> For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a director who is appointed by the President for a 5 year term, and can only be fired for a narrow list of reasons. The Supreme Court struck down that restriction and said, roughly, that any inquiry into why the President is firing a particular bureaucrat would infringe on the Executive power that is vested in the President alone.
No, it didn't. It struck down the combination of that protection and a single-director government structure, declaring that because Congress had established a single-responsible-officer structure, it could not also (even though the CFPB exercised quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, do which the Court had allowed similar arrangements for multidirector agencies) restrict dismissal of the director to limited cause.
It very much did not find that any legal restriction on why the President is firing a particular bureaucrat “would infringe on the Executive power that is vested in the President alone” (and, in fact, a wide array of bureaucrats in the federal executive enjoy exactly the kind of protection that was not permitted to the head of the CFPB because of the structure of the agency.)
And it even moreso did not find that any inquiry into such a firing (such as the Congress might do before applying after-the-fact, discretionary consequences like impeachment and removal) would violate the Executive Power.
I agree with the outcome of that case, but don't think it goes far enough. Scalia's dissent in Morrison v Olson seems like the best understanding of the Constitution's requirement that "the executive Power shall be vested in a President" and that "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." To Scalia, the President cannot be deprived of control anywhere a "purely executive power" is exercised.
From the Federal Reserve Act, Section 10.6 "Nothing in this Act contained shall be construed as taking away any powers heretofore vested by law in the Secretary of the Treasury which relate to the supervision, management, and control of the Treasury Department and bureaus under such department, and wherever any power vested by this Act in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal reserve agent appears to conflict with the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, such powers shall be exercised subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary."
The constitution gives Congress the power to create money, then congress delegated this right to Treasury by passing the legal tender act in 1862. This right has been delegated to the Federal Reserve system so they now issue Federal Reserve Notes, but is subject to the supervision and control of the Secretary of the Treasury as specified in 10.6
But in practice we give the Fed leeway so as to not be seen as interfering in money creation and reserve policy because that is what financial markets demand and is what the general class of educated and influential people believe is the best approach.
Not exactly.
The government created a cleavage between the Fed (and, therefore, monetary policy) and Congress/Treasury (and, therefore, fiscal policy), because they perceived that faith in the currency would be enhanced and government borrowing would be cheaper if currency users (including potential dollar-denominated debt holders) knew that the entity responsibly for borrowing and repaying the debt had a strong (even if only political, and not strictly binding) barrier to monetization of the debt.
The idea of the Federal Reserve urinates all over the Constitutional principle that people weilding power stand for election.
Doom on us for permitting such.
From what I've seen in other countries, you don't update protocols for this. You introduce better ones and kill the old ones once nobody used them for a while. Which might take longer than expected, because "free instant transfers" might be seen as cannibalizing the "slightly less slow expensive transfers" any given bank might have on offer.
For comparison, the third world underdeveloped country where I live has an electronic cash transfer system allowing me to send ANY amount of money in 10 minutes at most for $0.5 usd.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647166
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638063
This is probably because people often conflate SFTP (ssh-based protocol) with FTPS (FTP over TLS) eg. royal bank which says "secure ftp" (which suggests SFTP), but also mentions SSL (which suggests FTPS).
during my internship, a big healthcare representative came at the company to ask for help about their IT system. Turns out it was mass FTP transfer. I was silent for a few minutes thinking hospital networks relied on this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
Fedwire is a much faster, more modern system than ACH. You can only access it if you are a bank, though. ACH is available to anyone, but it's old and uses FTP.
There are also a faster modernized next-day and same-day versions of ACH available as of the last few years. I haven't checked out their protocols, though, to see if they still use FTP.
there's nothing wrong with that, at least it isn't fake-rest, and most other delivery technology are proprietary anyway.
TL;DR: this is how LinuxCare came to be:
1997 - BindCo was a contract manfacturer for the publication of all SUN Systems OS CD media...
Based in Redwood City Ca.
I was the IT manager there...
So SUN has a conf call with us, as we were creating and serving and receiving orders via FTP (I cant recall the name for the process) - but basically: We would receive an order manifest via FTP to a server and then we would have to make an order form for what was required...
Our FTP servers required us to login and manually accept and find these manifests....
So we hired some consultants; Dave Sifry and some others who went on to google etc..
But here was the thing:
We were taking orders via FTP and SUN wanted us to start accepting this new protocol they deemed XML and wanted us to be the test case for XML and I did something stupid:
I, on a call with SUN, said the following as a young IT manager:
"So let me get this straight; *"You have a crappy data reporting system and you want us to install an unknown system called XML for data qualification into our system and we have never heard of it"*
Yeah, I might have prevented months of adoption of XML by accident.
What have you done as a major fuck-up in your career?
That company became LinuxCare and Sifry was valued at $100 million
Just based on me telling david he should create a company that offered Linux support...
I'd rather have that and deal with its limitations than try and stomach what passes for modern engineering these days.
Some solutions I see these days should be considered criminally negligent if they were to be used in any HA environments for governments, health care organizations, or similar bodies.
Target uptime for the last eight years is 99.85% (ACH service availability), exceeded in all years going back to 2012. Couldn't find a FedWire (which was also down) quality stats page, but I'd expect similar uptime targets and measured quality.
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/9907/in-a-uri...
https://doublepulsar.com/apache-struts-and-the-three-leading...
Now there is a real-time settlement system for the entire country.
...for certain definitions of "functional".
From https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
Who owns the Federal Reserve?
The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.
The constitution vests Judicial power in an independent judiciary, but provides that the POTUS shall be elected and that executive power shall be vested in him/her... and that legislative power shall be vested in Congress, with Representatives and Senators elected by the people.
To say that there are agencies that are simply outside of that system... it seems to fly in the face of the basic things that kids learn in Elementary school.
The Department of Defense (aka military) takes their orders from the POTUS / Commander in Chief. We should freak if the military went rogue and decided to invade a country without approval. Yet, we're supposed to want other executive departments to act without regard to the wishes of the elected president?
> [The FED] is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.
I mean, it sounds as if they're claiming to be a Legislative Branch agency.
Not great if you consider democracy to the be a universally good thing of which more is always better. But it really isn't true. The majority can do good or bad things.
> To say that there are agencies that are simply outside of that system... it seems to fly in the face of the basic things that kids learn in Elementary school.
In every field, the basic things that kids learn in elementary school tend to be incomplete or wrong, and government is definitely no exception, but independent agencies are not outside the system.
> I mean, it sounds as if they're claiming to be a Legislative Branch agency.
No, accountability to Congress is not exclusive to legislative branch agencies.
1) was created by Congress
2) is accountable to Congress
3) has governors that are paid by Congress
4) has governors appointed by the President
It's little PCAOB, and a little Post Office. Point being it's not autonomous nor private.