from New York Sun
The big news of the day is the resignation of the presidents of two regional Federal Reserve Banks amid a contretemps over their trading for their own accounts. Eric Rosengren, citing his health, is stepping down as president of the Boston Fed. Robert Kaplan is stepping down as head of the Dallas Fed. He’s saying the recent focus on his financial disclosure risks becoming a distraction to the bank’s execution of its “vital work.”
Good luck to them both, we say. We don’t mind confessing that we lack a sense of whether their trading broke any regulations. It’s hard to imagine, though, that whatever they did amounts to more than a hill of beans — a flyspeck — compared to the havoc that the rest of the custodians of our monetary system have wreaked in the past generation. Since the start of 2001, the value of the one-dollar Federal Reserve Note has fallen 84%.