This is something to be followed. The Fed was trying to push interest/mortgage ever downward. The GOP may stop these plans and rates may float again with supply and demand which probably means higher rates.
“There’s certainly going to be more hearings and more pressure,” said Mark Calabria, a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide who is now director of financial- regulation studies at the Cato Institute, a policy research group in Washington that favors free markets.
One new Fed opponent in Congress is Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul, who has criticized the Fed for imposing “the sneakiest tax of all -- inflation.” He joins South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, an advocate for Tea Party candidates who backed an unsuccessful bill to subject the Fed’s monetary policy to congressional audits.
A lot of politicians were critical of bailout and loans to AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.
Bernanke argued that audits of monetary policy would compromise the independence of the central bank. A letter he sent to DeMint in May warned that audits would “seriously threaten monetary policy independence, increase inflation fears and market interest rates, and damage economic stability and job creation.”
Darrell Issa, who would take over as the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and be the Republican’s chief inquisitor of administration, already has the Fed in his sights. This year, he’s pressed the central bank for documents related to the AIG rescue and demanded Bernanke explain his role in authorizing payments to the insurer’s counterparties, calling him an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the bailout.
Scrutiny of the central bank will continue, Issa pledged in an interview last month, saying that Congress must “look in- depth behind the curtain, rather than simply have the Fed chairman come up and lecture us.”
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