It's Time for Transparency and Accountability at the Fed

In February, all of the Federal Reserve’s payments systems failed for half a day. The systems include FedWire, which the Fed itself advertises as the “premier electronic funds-transfer service that banks rely on for mission-critical, same-day transactions,” as well as the ACH network offered for payroll and other large transactions. This isn’t the only recent failure; in April 2019, FedWire also went down for hours.  

The most obvious, but perhaps not most serious, concern is that the core infrastructure of the U.S. financial system keeps failing. Fedwire processes over $3 trillion in payments per day.  The Fed’s ACH network processes over $60 billion per day.