Criticism
Controversy about the Federal Reserve Act and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System has existed since prior to its passage. Some of the questions raised include: whether Congress has the Constitutional power to delegate its power to coin money or issue paper money, whether the Federal Reserve is a public cartel of private banks (also called a banking cartel) established to protect powerful financial interests, and whether the Federal Reserve's actions increased the severity of the Great Depression in the 1930s (and/or the severity or frequency of other boom-bust economic cycles, such as the late-2000s recession).
Allegations that the Act was passed while most of Congress was away for Christmas on December 23 are not supported by the legislative history: The house passed the bill 298-60 with 76 not voting, while the Senate passed it 43-25 with 27 not voting, showing 70%-80% participation before accounting for announced pairs.
Read more about this topic: Federal Reserve Act
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)