In the News

In 1935, as Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield,” comedian and Dickens scholar W.C. Fields underscored financial struggle: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, happiness; annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six, misery.”
Were this Dickens’ London, many of us would be in debtors’ prisons run by CEOs and shareholders the political establishment allows to rig our elections and economy.

MANCHESTER — An aldermanic committee charged with determining the viability of establishing a public bank in Manchester will move ahead with its mission, despite statements by the city’s finance director that he is skeptical of the idea.

In March, the Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted to create the Special Committee on Establishing a Manchester Public Bank, based on a suggestion by Ward 4 Alderman Chris Herbert. The committee, consisting of aldermen Kevin Cavanaugh, Ron Ludwig, Dan O’Neil, Bill Barry and Herbert as chairman, held its first meeting on Tuesday.

For the 12th consecutive year, the head of the Bank of North Dakota reported record net income to the nation’s only state-owned bank to state officials.
Eric Hardmeyer, president of Bank of North Dakota, provided the North Dakota Industrial Commission with the bank’s final 2015 annual report on Wednesday. For 2015, the bank reported about $130.7 million in net income, cruising past the $111 million reported for 2014.
“This was a record-setting year for the Bank of North Dakota,” Hardmeyer said. “A lot of growth over the past 10 years.”

SAN FRANCISCO/RUSTON, La. (Reuters) – A former top Federal Reserve policy advisor called Monday for the Fed’s 12 regional outposts to be made government entities, rather than owned, as they have been since their inception more than a century ago, by the banks they regulate.

Banks own shares in their regional Fed bank and appoint six of the nine members of the board, including three bank executives. While the Fed’s powerful Washington-based Board, including the Fed Chair, is a government entity, the regional Fed banks are not. The U.S. central bank is the world’s only major central bank that is not fully public.

Dartmouth College Professor Andrew Levin also called for seven-year term limits for all Fed policymakers, and stronger outside oversight of the U.S. central bank including annual reviews of monetary policy.

Policymakers often serve a decade or more before retiring, and the details of monetary policymaking have always been a closely guarded secret, with transcripts of meetings released only after a five-year interval.

Levin, who advised Fed Chair Janet Yellen when she was Fed vice chair, released the proposals via the Fed Up Coalition, a network of community organizations and labor unions calling for change to the U.S. central bank. It is unclear how they will be received by other Fed critics who have called for even more sweeping changes, or the institution itself, which has largely resisted reform proposals.