Rethinking the Federal Reserve’s Policy Framework and Independence

Part of the Levy Economics Institute Capitol Hill Series

The Levy Economics Institute is proud to launch our Capitol Hill Series. In this series of talks, we will be hosting financial experts, academics, and policymakers in Washington, DC to discuss the most pressing issues facing our economy. Registration is free to attend in person at the Rayburn House Office Building. Refreshments and catering will be available after the discussions. 

Moderated by Claire Jones, Financial Times

Speakers include:

• Introduction | Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Levy Economics Institute 
• “Why Fed Independence Matters” | Claudia Sahm, New Century Advisors
• “Congress and the Federal Reserve” | James K. Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin 
• “The Fed Is Still Flying Blind” | L. Randall Wray, Levy Economics Institute
• “When Does ‘Independence’ Become Tyranny?” | William Bergman, Former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

William Bergman is a semi-retired independent scholar with four decades of financial market and related educational experience, in private and public sector roles. From 1990 to 2004, he served as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an MBA (Finance) and an MA (Public Policy) from the University of Chicago in 1990. He is married, with three grown and successful kids.

Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. He chairs the board of Economists for Peace and Security [epsusa.org] and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project [utip.lbj.utexas.edu]. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee in the early 1980s. From 1993 to 1997, he served as chief technical adviser to China’s State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform, and in the first half of 2015 as an informal counselor to the Greek minister of finance.

Claudia Sahm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors. She is a highly regarded expert on monetary and fiscal policy with many years of experience advising key decision-makers at the Federal Reserve, White House, and Congress. She developed the Sahm rule, a closely followed indicator of recessions. Sahm holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan (2007), and a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science, and German from Denison University (1998).

Institute President Pavlina R. Tcherneva is a professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard Economic Democracy Initiative. She specializes in modern money and public policy. Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020) is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today, recognized by the Financial Times in 2020 and published in nine languages. Her early work assessed Argentina’s adoption of a similar large-scale job creation proposal she had developed with colleagues in the United States. Tcherneva has collaborated with experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the International Labor Organization, members of the European Parliament, as well as policy makers from the United States and abroad on designing and evaluating employment programs. She also worked with the Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign after her research on inequality had garnered national attention. In 2020, she was invited to serve on the Biden-Harris economic policy volunteer committee, during their Presidential run.Her areas of research include monetary and fiscal policy coordination, the Bernanke doctrine, and policy responses during the 2008 and 2020 COVID-induced economic crises. She is the coeditor of Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey (Edward Elgar 2004), a rare collection of writings on employment and inflation by the Nobel Prize–winning economist, adapted for the modern day.  In 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, U.K., where she immersed herself in J.M. Keynes’s collected writings. She developed an interpretation of Keynes’s policy approach to full employment for which she was recognized by the Association for Social Economics with the Helen Potter Prize (2012).

Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Emeritus Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his newest book on the topic is Understanding Modern Money Theory: Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar).Recent books include: A Great Leap Forward: Heterodox Economic Policy for the 21st Century; Academic Press; 2020; Making Money Work for Us (Polity, November 2022), a companion illustrated guide, Money For Beginners (Polity, May 2023, with Levy Institute graduate Heske Van Doornen), and the third edition of Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (Springer, 2024). He is also the author of Why Minsky Matters (Princeton, 2015). He is the editor (or co-editor) of many books, including most recently: Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers, edited by L. R. Wray, P. Armstrong, S. Holland, C. Jackson-Prior, P. Plumridge, N. Wilson, Edward Elgar, 2023; and Handbook of Economic Stagnation (with F. Dantas), Academic Press, Elsevier, 2022.Forthcoming books include The Vision of Hyman Minsky, Princeton University Press (forthcoming 2026); Why Democrats Lose and How a Progressive Vision Can Win, with Pavlina R. Tcherneva (in progress). He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for lifetime contributions to Institutionalist Thought. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to Italy (twice) and to Estonia, and a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo, Rome, UNAM in Mexico City, UNICAMP in Brazil, Tallinn University in Estonia, Nankai University, China, and a visiting professor on a continuing basis at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He was the Distinguished Visiting Professor, Willamette University, Oregon 2022-23.