Republican lawmakers are seizing on a monetary-policy debate that’s older than the Federal Reserve itself as a means of hemming in the central bank as it enters its second century.
Led by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, they’ve accused the Fed of following a haphazard, discretionary policy that investors have found hard to fathom and that has done little to help the economy, even as it recovers slowly from the worst crisis since the 1930s. As an alternative, they want Fed Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues to adopt a rules-based approach that they say would be more understandable and reliable.
