The Federal Reserve Lacks the ‘Earnings’ With Which Legally To Fund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The central bank is in circumstances that the authors of Dodd-Frank failed to anticipate — it’s been operating at a loss. The Federal Reserve cannot legally fund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now, because the Fed has no earnings and no retained earnings. The Supreme Court may have recently affirmed the constitutionality of the bureau’s statutory funding provision “allowing the Bureau to draw money from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System,” as the Court wrote. That, though, does not change the fact that since there are no earnings, there...