The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) is running a campaign (“Fed Up”) that aims to encourage more accommodative monetary policies and greater transparency and public engagement in the governance of the Federal Reserve, and specifically in the selection of regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents and leaders. The Open Philanthropy Project has decided to renew our support for Fed Up with an additional $1 million in funding, plus up to $1 million to match whatever Fed Up raises from other funders this year. This is the third grant we’ve made to support CPD’s work on this campaign.
Our default expectation for this grant, as in previous years, is that it is relatively unlikely to have an impact on the Fed’s monetary policy, but that if it does, the benefits would likely be very large. We believe the call for greater transparency and public engagement in the selection of regional Federal Reserve bank leadership is more unambiguously positive and also more likely to succeed, though we do not have much sense of the humanitarian impact of such a change.
June 2017 update: In total, we ended up providing $429,000 in matching funding. The “amount” above has been updated to reflect this.