From the Huffington Post (ht Naked Capitalism) :

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.

The FED’s dominance of the economic research field also explains how the FED was able to get so many economists to sign a petition that urged continued “independence of the FED”.  We’ve said it before: If the FED is independent from Congressional oversight, then we are just trusting that a “benevolent” FED will oversee itself. What/who made the employees of the Federal Reserve so good, so trustworthy?  How did only they, of all the regulators in the world, escape the evil temptation to cater to its own special interests – that thoroughly besets the rest of the world?  It’s a neat trick – but we just don’t buy it…