The FED is only interested today in supporting the federal government its original charter was to prevent bank runs by buying and selling commercial paper. FDR changed that and so today the FED tries to control the economy with interest rates and buying and selling government debt neither of these works at economic smoothing and so we have what we have a situation where the government thinks it can control the economy but actual has no way to do so. The discussion is to long for a blog post but it is a fact why else to we have under 2% growth +/- 1% interest and trillions of dollars in debt?