What’s the one thing Barney Frank and Ron Paul can agree on? That it’s time to audit the Federal Reserve . Frank:

“They have had since 1932… the right to intervene in the economy almost whenever they” wanted to, Frank said, noting that the Fed relied on its extraordinary lending power to forward billions to financial institutions last fall. He intends to curtail that lending power, he said. “Finally we will subject them to a complete audit,” he said.

Frank’s announcement that legislation to make the Fed more transparent would pass the House of Representatives “probably in October” came on the heels of a judge’s decision requiring the Fed to obey the Freedom of Information Act:

The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders. Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit. “The Federal Reserve has to be accountable for the decisions that it makes,” said U.S. Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, after Preska’s ruling. “It’s one thing to say that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution. It’s another thing to say that it can keep us all in the dark.”(Emphasis mine)

The Federal Reserve was created to take politics out of economic decision-making. Franks is careful to point out that the House bill will avoid damaging that independence:

“I have been working with Ron Paul, the main sponsor of that bill. He agrees that we don’t want to have the audit appear as if it is influencing monetary policy, because that would be inflationary and Ron and I agree on that.” […] “One of the things the audit will show is what the Federal Reserve buys and sells, and that will be made public,” Frank said. “But not instantly, because… you would have a lot of people trading off of that, and you would have too much impact on the market. Again Ron agrees with that, so we will probably have that data released after a time period of several months, enough time so it wouldn’t be market-sensitive. That will be part of the overall Fed regulation that we are inducting.”

Progressives need to get on the right side of popular outrage over taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions. Transparency is, and should always be, a part of the progressive agenda.