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The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Anna Paulson, recently visited Williamsport for a meeting and a tour of the Pennsylvania College of Technology. During the visit, she spoke with the Sun-Gazette and we hope our readers found that interview to be informative.
To be honest, we hesitated to commit to covering this visit.
The highlight of the visit was a closed-door meeting with unspecified business leaders, to which the Sun-Gazette was repeatedly told we were not invited.
A public official having a secretive meeting, excluding the media and general public, does not sit well with us.
Our purpose is to keep government -- particularly local government, though in this specific case the entity evading the public's right to know is federal -- transparent and accountable.
We believe that transparency is an essential part of ensuring the government and interconnected entities serve the needs of all of their constituents.
We are troubled by the implication that the Federal Reserve can craft monetary policy that serves the interests of all Americans by excluding so, so many Americans from the discussion.
This aversion to full transparency is, frankly, not new for the Federal Reserve system -- it has been the Federal Reserve's approach for years if not decades.
In those years, we've occasionally wondered if greater transparency and accountability would produce leadership that recognizes the strain and toll unemployment places on our society, leadership more mindful that stagnation in wages and salaries coupled with rising costs for housing, health care and other essential goods and services only depreciates the value of Americans' hard work.
Perhaps our assessment of where our economy stands and what our economy needs is wrong. But we're willing to have that discussion -- publically, in full view of people of different backgrounds and different perspectives.
We only wonder why, wherever the people in that room think the economy stands and whatever they think the economy needs, they feel the need to shut people out of their discussion.