Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise, obviously, in strong support of this legislation. I don't know how anybody could be against transparency.

They want secrecy, especially when the secrecy is to protect individuals who deal in trillions of dollars, much bigger than what the Congress does. And these trillions of dollars bail out all the wealthy, rich people; the banks and the big corporations; international, overseas banks; bailing out Europe; dealing with central banks around Europe and different places.

And to say that we should have secrecy and to say that it's political to have transparency, well, it's very political when you have a Federal Reserve that can bail out one company and not another company. That's pretty political.

I think when people talk about independence and having this privacy of the central bank means they want secrecy, and secrecy is not good. We should have privacy for the individual, but we should have openness of government all the time, and we've drifted a long way from that.

The bill essentially removes the prohibitions against a full audit. To audit, we should know what kind of transactions there are. We should know about the deals that they made when they were fixing the price of LIBOR. These are the kinds of things that have gone on for years that we have no access to.

Congress has this responsibility. We are reneging on our responsibility. We have had the responsibility and we have not done it, so it is up to us to reassert ourselves.

The Constitution is very clear who has the responsibility, but the law conflicts with the Constitution. The law comes along and says the Congress can't do it. Well, you can't change the Constitution and prohibit the Congress from finding out what's going on by writing a law, and this is what has happened.

So it is time that we repeal this prohibition against a full audit of the Federal Reserve. We deserve it. The American people deserve it. The American people know about it and understand it, and that's what they're asking for. They're sick and tired of what happened in the bailout, where the wealthy got bailed out and the poor lost their jobs and they lost their homes.

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Mr. PAUL. Did you vote against Dodd-Frank? Because it was in Dodd-Frank. It wasn't a separate bill. Maybe on a separate vote you might have done it, but it was in Dodd-Frank.

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