Concerns over the revolving door is especially high in New York, where the New York Fed exists in close proximity to major outposts of America’s biggest financial institutions. This proximity became the focus of a 2014 ProPublica investigation that documented not only the coziness of rulemakers and bankers, but the way it leads to lax regulation: One former New York Fed examiner claimed she was fired for questioning policies at Goldman Sachs, though her lawsuit against the Fed has been dismissed.

The New York Fed’s own study, which was published last year and considered 35,000 former and current regulators, identified numerous examples of public employees quickly turning private. The study found that banks hire former regulators more aggressively when the government is implementing lots of regulations or enforcing existing regulations more strictly, likely because such people are highly knowledgeable when it comes to the ins and outs of those regulations. Overall, the report was skeptical of the claim that regulators were going easy on banks in return for cushy jobs, and raised the important question of what the Fed’s talent pool of potential hires would look like in the absence of a revolving door.

The Fed, for its part, is already considering new measures for neutralizing the revolving door, including imposing some post-employment restrictions on Fed examiners.

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