Sort of huge news from the Fed. It was just announced that starting in April Chairman Bernanke will start participating in press conferences four times a year. This should please the folks who regularly complain that the Fed is not transparent enough.I'm thinking they should take this a step further and turn it into some sort of reality tv show. Imagine if we had Ryan Seacrest join Mr. Bernanke once a month on a stage in Hollywood. They could take calls from random Americans who spent their entire week researching the many minutia of Fed policy and history. We could call it "Stumping Ben" and the person who could ask the chairman a monetary policy question that he could not answer in 30 seconds or less would win a trip to the district bank of their choice.
The suspense would be incredible. I can almost picture Ryan Seacrest saying, "All right Katie from Des Moines, Iowa, if Ben cannot answer your question about quantitative easing you are going to be on your way to the Kansas City Fed and District 10!"
