THUMBS DOWN Fed Up with the Fed

THUMBS DOWN

to Robert McTeer Jr., president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, for wasting taxpayers’ money in the building of the Dallas Fed’s baronial new headquarters at 2200 N. Pearl St. According to a recent General Accounting Office report, the Dallas Fed spent an extra S7 million buying land it didn’t need, in part to accommodate a 27,000-square-foot lobby. While Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan disputes the report and insists the project was finished under budget, his words would carry more weight if the Fed wasn’t such a free-spending agency; the same GAO report noted that between 1988 and 1994 the Fed’s operating costs rose at twice the rate of inflation.