Watt denies gutting Ron Paul’s ‘Audit the Fed’ proposal

Representative Mel Watt, a North Carolina Democrat who chairs a House Financial Services subcommittee, denied gutting legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, as the bill’s sponsor, Texas Republican Ron Paul, charged. The proposal, which has 308 co-sponsors, would allow audits of the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations. Fed officials oppose the bill. The Fed has drawn scrutiny from Congress and the public after it bailed out financial institutions and doubled its balance sheet to $2.16 trillion in the last 14 months to stem the deepest recession since the 1930s and unlock frozen credit markets. “We don’t want to have politicians second-guessing the Fed on monetary policy,” Watt said in a telephone interview today. “When Ron Paul says I gutted the bill, he’s exaggerating. I support auditing a number of transactions.”