You may have read this disturbing crime story:

The prosecutors presented evidence that “sharing advance knowledge of Fed interest-rate decisions could have allowed Beijing to generate ‘enormous profits’ from trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasuries.”

This advance information could have been worth billions of dollars to the Chinese traders.  That’s one of the biggest bank robberies of all time.

But this sordid tale brings us to an issue that has bothered us about the Fed for many years.

Why does the agency operate behind a veil of secrecy? The Fed Board is like the old wisemen who sit in a cave and predict the future by studying the shadows of the dancing flames on the wall.

The Fed needs a Perestroika. Openness. They need to be audited regularly, as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has urged for years.

Every Fed meeting at the ironically titled “Open Market Committee” should have C-SPAN cameras covering the deliberations. The “minutes” of their deliberations should be immediately published – not a week or two later.

Finally, new Fed chairman Kevin Warsh should announce a price rule (perhaps the CRB commodity index) for interest rate policy to end the Wall Street guessing game about when the Fed will raise or lower interest rates. Insider trading and uncertainty are always bad for efficient markets.