April 27, 2010 11:36AM # The Case for Auditing the Fed By Cato Editors --- SHARE Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goals that it had followed for decades. Rep. Ron Paul (R‑TX) has introduced a bill calling for an audit of the Fed. Remarkably, there is significant opposition to such oversight, and the political prospects for undertaking such an audit are relatively bleak. In [a new paper](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11702), Cato scholar [Arnold Kling](https://www.cato.org/people/arnold-kling) examines the processes and outcomes on which an audit should focus, and looks at opposition to the audit: > We should document why the Fed took each step, what the expected results were, and whether those results were achieved. …The profit or loss of the Fed’s investments would provide a very helpful indicator of whether the Fed’s actions served the economy as a whole or merely transferred wealth from ordinary taxpayers to bank shareholders. [Read the whole thing. ](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11702) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).