Secrets of the Temple Persist

Fellow journalist  Bill Greider, a columnist for the far-left magazine The Nation and, in spite of this, a marvelous human being, wrote his best-seller about the Fed's inner workings back in 1988, when the central bank  and its all-powerful Federal Open Market Committee had no more transparency than the Kremlin  back in the days of the Soviet Union.   The book inspired Texas Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, to wage war on Alan Greenspan and the Fed to make its  decision making process  more transparent. After all, the Fed is run by bankers.  There was no check on these bankers to keep them from using their power to benefit their own industry at the expense of others. 
Fed Chairman Al Greenspan  in one of his career low points, famously misled congress to keep a secret Fed tapes of monetary meetings out of Gonzalez's hands.
  Transparency has improved somewhat since then.  The Fed now releases minutes of monetary meetings three full weeks  after the fact.  Full transcripts are available after five years.  This delay remains an outrage in a society where the government and its agents supposedly are in the service of the people.  And who is to know who sees the minutes in advance and is privy to information that provides a trading advantage in the markets?
  The Federal Open Market Committee  in a 1981  lawsuit (I an relying on a 2011 article by Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation) claimed that timely release of its would roil the markets and out it at a disadvantage as it tried to conduct policy . The courts sided with the FOMC.
  The arguments seem silly now that the Bank of England has begun release its minutes almost immediately. Furthermore, the minutes released by the BOE are three times longer that the FOMC's and included detailed footnotes.
 You can see for yourself here:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/monetary20150714a1.pdf

and here:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/minutes/Documents/mpc/pdf/2015/aug.pdf

Congress should pressure the Fed to follow the BOE's example.