Has the US Federal Reserve been Transparent?

The short and direct answer is NO.

The US Federal Reserve has even opted to defy their self-imposed policy.

Reports the Wall Street Journal

The Federal Reserve has pledged to be more transparent, but it is only willing to go so far.

The central bank normally releases comprehensive transcripts of its policy-making meetings five years after the sessions. But when news organizations requested transcripts of the meetings around the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed released redacted documents that revealed only pleasantries from the sessions and no substantive discussions.

In early March, the central bank published on its website 513 of about 7,000 pages of transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings from 2007 through 2010, according to a March 7 letter from FOMC Secretary William English that also was posted online.

The heavily redacted transcripts reflect who attended the meetings, reveal comments at the start and finish of the sessions, and transcribe some banter in between, but no talk about economics or policy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is quoted calling the meetings to order, introducing staff presentations, honoring departing colleagues and adjourning the sessions for lunch.

The Fed isn't required under law to release details of its policy deliberations, but decided in 1993 to begin releasing nearly full transcripts of FOMC meetings after a five-year lag. That was in response to pressure from Congress on the central bank to be more open about its deliberations. Few major central banks release transcripts of their policy meetings.

When government engages in the picking of winners and losers or of the political or unilateral redistribution of scarce resources, contending interest groups who vie for these resources—and who don’t become the anointed—would always question the selection process. Thus, government choices would always be subjected to political controversies and conflicts that spawn social stress.

In addition, political agents do not want to be held accountable for the risks or unintended consequences from the decisions they make, or of the policies they impose. So opacity would be their default behavior.

SM Oliva formerly of the Mises Institute captures the essence of the innate non-transparency of governments.

“Transparency” is a buzzword associated with all sorts of good-government movements. But it’s something of a libertarian Trojan horse. No government can ever be transparent, for that would rob of it of its very substance. All monopoly government is predicated on the ability to actively mislead and misdirect the majority — the public — away from the truth, whether it’s political truth, economic truth, or personal truth. Even government attempts at transparency are themselves usually little more than misdirection by another name. One can be transparent in such a way as to satisfy most inquisitors while revealing nothing that compromises the basic pillars of the state.

Bottom line: Centralized political structures are inherently non-transparent.

And buzzwords of “transparency” or “independence” account for as political doublespeak or part of the communications campaign to sanitize reality.