Who's Holding the Bag?

Or: Robber barons don't like central banks, so maybe we should.

As I’ve written previously, I’m not a fan of how corporations and the wealthy elite have been buying our government out from under us for 50-odd years, resulting in levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since the robber barons were riding roughshod over the nation during America’s last Gilded Age. So I try to pay attention to financial legislation—the boring stuff that flies under most people’s identity politics rage bait radar—because that’s usually where they’re slowly dragging us back to serfdom.

Every piece of legislation is sold as solving some problem for the American people—which, really, is the only justification for passing a law in the first place. The question you have to ask is which American people: the 99% of us who work to make the world go round, or the modern day robber barons and the corporations-are-people-too they use as leverage?

Let’s look at this legislative package aimed at “holding the Federal Reserve accountable.” Sounds good, right? If you’ve been paying $18 for breakfast and watching your rent crawl skyward like mold on a wet wall, it probably feels cathartic to imagine someone finally reining in the money wizards behind the curtain. After all, didn’t the Fed pump trillions into the economy just a few years ago, only for most of it to balloon stock portfolios while the rest of us got crushed by inflation?

But here’s the thing: the bill doesn’t tax windfall profits. It doesn’t break up monopolies. It doesn’t make groceries cheaper, rent more reasonable, or wages go up. It doesn’t do a damn thing about the price-gouging that just keeps coming. What it does do is tie the hands of the only institution that can move quickly to stabilize the economy in a crisis—while giving Congress (and by extension, their donors) more control over monetary policy.

And while the Fed isn’t innocent—its delayed response did help drive inflation—it wasn’t alone. Every Fortune 500 CEO who saw a crisis as a pricing opportunity bears as much blame. Inflation cooled off months ago, but your bills didn’t. Once prices go up, they stick—especially when there’s no competition forcing them down.

So who benefits from a weaker, more politicized Fed? Not you. Not your landlord, your kid’s teacher, or the guy fixing your car. The real beneficiaries are the same as always: the donor class, the asset hoarders, and the corporate entities that write economic policy by proxy. This isn’t about transparency. It’s about leverage. And once again, it’s not yours.

---

---

For those of you who know the Federal Reserve only as the big vault full of gold that’s constantly being robbed in movies, the real Fed is a lot less shiny but far more powerful. It was created in 1913 after a string of financial panics exposed the danger of letting private financiers—like J.P. Morgan—function as de facto central banks. The goal was to stabilize the economy by managing interest rates, controlling the money supply, and stepping in during financial crises. But the Fed was never purely a public institution. From the beginning, it was a compromise—powerful enough to calm markets when things got rocky, but insulated enough from popular pressure to keep corporate America comfortable.

That uneasy balance held for much of the 20th century. But over the last fifty years, as corporations and the ultra-wealthy steadily bought out Congress, regulatory agencies, and the courts, the Fed found itself increasingly expected to serve two masters: keep the financial markets happy and the labor market stable—while cleaning up messes it didn’t make and avoiding any policy decisions that might upset the donor class. The modern elite still distrust the Fed when it acts independently—especially if it threatens to regulate, intervene, or raise rates in ways that hurt speculative gains. They love it when it props up stock prices. They loathe it when it hints at putting public stability ahead of private profits.

So when I see a bill—or in this case, a whole bundle of them—promising to make the Fed more “accountable,” my first question isn’t what does it say it’ll do? It’s who does it actually serve? Because if we’ve learned anything from decades of deregulation and crisis profiteering, it’s that “accountability” usually means keeping powerful institutions in line—not with the public, but with political donors. And this legislation has bipartisan support—which shouldn’t be a surprise, since neither party can run a serious campaign without dark money PACs funded by the very interests that would prefer a Fed too weak to stop them. Just like the last time the robber barons ruled the country, both parties are on board. And just like last time, the people left out of the conversation are the ones who stand to lose the most.

So let’s take a look at what this new legislative package aimed at the Federal Reserve really does—not in the press release, but in practice.

First up, we have the Rein in the Federal Reserve Act. This one sells itself as a transparency fix. It gives Congress the power to monitor and, if necessary, cancel emergency programs launched by the Fed. The idea is that no unelected officials should be able to dump billions into the economy without some democratic oversight. And if Congress were a functional body with any real accountability to the public, maybe that wouldn’t sound so bad.

But what it actually does is politicize the Fed’s ability to respond to crises. Under this bill, the same Congress that can barely keep the lights on without threatening a government shutdown every six months would now be in charge of reauthorizing emergency lending programs. That means if markets are crashing, banks are teetering, or credit is freezing up, the Fed has to wait for a bunch of lobbyist-funded show ponies to stop yelling at each other long enough to hold a vote. If you liked how Congress handled COVID, the debt ceiling, and basic infrastructure, you’re going to love them in charge of triaging financial meltdowns.

What this bill really accomplishes is simple: it transfers power away from technocrats and toward politicians—but not in the name of the public. It’s in the name of the donor class, who will have even more direct influence over who gets bailed out and who gets left holding the bag.

Next, there’s the Regular Order for Investments (ROI) of the Federal Reserve Act. This one’s got a name that makes it sound like a bookkeeping workshop. In reality, it’s a stealth attack on the Fed’s ability to manage the economy during downturns. It demands that the Fed comply with traditional corporate accounting rules, including “mark-to-market” valuation, which means it has to pretend all its assets are being sold off at today’s prices—even if they’re not. In a volatile market, that guarantees the Fed will appear to be hemorrhaging money, which in turn justifies calls for belt-tightening and retreat. Imagine forcing a firefighter to report a deficit on their water usage before being allowed to put out the blaze.

It also restricts the Fed’s ability to buy mortgage-backed securities or long-dated bonds—two of its most effective tools for stabilizing housing markets and pushing down long-term borrowing costs. That may not mean much if you’re sitting on a paid-off house and a pile of cash. But if you’re trying to buy your first home, keep your current one, or refinance debt in a crunch, this is the kind of rule that quietly shifts the entire landscape away from affordability and toward speculation. It’s not about transparency. It’s about locking the public out of public tools, so that the private sector can rent them back to us at interest.

Last but not least, let’s look at the Right-Size the Federal Reserve Act. The final piece of this package is a masterclass in austerity branding. It caps the size of the Fed’s balance sheet at 10% of GDP, which sounds like a guardrail against runaway spending—until you realize that the entire point of a central bank is to expand or contract its balance sheet based on what the economy actually needs. During a recession or a crisis, an artificial cap like this doesn’t just tie one hand behind the Fed’s back—it makes sure it can’t reach the fire extinguisher while the room is burning.

It also reimposes reserve requirements on banks and bans the Fed from paying interest on excess reserves. The sales pitch is that this will discipline lazy banks and stop them from gaming the system. But in reality, it punishes smaller banks that can’t easily shift funds across global markets, while the big players will simply reallocate their money and pass the cost on to you—through higher fees, tighter credit, and more of those “minimum balance” surprises we all love so much.

This isn’t about fiscal restraint. It’s about gutting the state’s ability to act in the public interest, so that markets—read: investors and corporations—get to dictate the terms of every recovery. If you’re wondering why your rent is up, your wages are flat, and your credit card is flirting with 30%, this is the machinery behind the misery. Policies like these don’t crash the economy overnight. They erode your options, making sure that when the next crisis comes—and it will—the only people who get rescued are the ones who never needed saving in the first place.

America’s last Gilded Age didn’t end because the system corrected itself—it ended with 25% unemployment, blood in the streets from clashes between workers and Pinkertons, and a financial collapse so big it dragged the global economy down with it. It took a generation of labor struggle, mass poverty, and economic catastrophe to even begin clawing power back from the oligarchs. Only then did one party finally blink and start passing reforms that treated the American people like something other than a resource to be extracted.

So here we are again, watching the same class of wealthy interests buy the rules, write the legislation, and muzzle the institutions that serve as guardrails. The new serfdom doesn’t come with lords in castles or chains on your ankles—it comes with shrinking wages, fixed prices, and policy so dry it hides its brutality in footnotes.

If it’s true that history repeats itself, we shouldn’t have long to wait before everything old is new again. The only question is whether we’ll recognize it in time to hit the brakes—or once again have to lose everything just to find our power and make our voice heard.