William Greider used to be in the mag at left:
Here is a very different way to understand the problem: to restore the broken financial system, Washington has to fix the Federal Reserve. Though this is not widely understood, the central bank has lost its ability to govern the credit system–the nation’s overall lending and borrowing. The Fed’s control mechanisms have been severely undermined by a generation of deregulation and tricky innovations that have substantially shifted credit functions from traditional banks to lightly regulated financial markets. When the Fed tried to apply its old tools, starting in the 1980s, the credit system perversely produced opposite results–an explosion of debt the policy-makers could not restrain. In its present condition, the Fed may even make things worse.