Central Bank Undersight: Assessing the Fed’s Accountability to Congress

Abstract: The Federal Reserve is the most distinctive federal entity in the United States government.  It exercises some of Congress’s most important constitutional duties and prerogatives—namely, the duty to regulate the value of money and the power to spend and borrow against the good name of the United States—yet does so with effectively no oversight from Congress.  This Article details the patterns and structural sources of Congress’s “undersight” of the Federal Reserve and illustrates the consequences of this phenomenon by discussing the losses on the Fed’s most recent round of securities purchases.

Speaker: Christina Parajon Skinner

Bio: Christina Parajon Skinner is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She an expert on financial policy and regulation, with a focus on central banks and fiscal authorities.  Her research pursues questions surrounding central bank mandates, monetary and fiscal policy, capitalism and financial markets, and the constitutional separation-of-powers.  Professor Skinner’s work is international and comparative in scope, drawing on her experience as an academic and central bank lawyer in the United Kingdom.  Her research has been published in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among other leading academic journals.  Professor Skinner has also contributed to financial regulatory policy working groups, including those convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Financial Stability Board, and the U.K. Banking Standards Board.  She is presently an Affiliate Fellow at the Stigler Center, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).

Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served as legal counsel at the Bank of England, in the Financial Stability Division of the Bank’s Legal Directorate. Previously, Professor Skinner was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, Law Department. From 2014-2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. Professor Skinner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a concentration in international economics.

Chair: Alperen Gözlügöl

A Buffet lunch will be served from 12pm.

This event will be on a first-come, first serve basis