As you know, these provisions call for the Federal Reserve to rely, as much as possible, on the examinations conducted by the functional supervisors and on public reports to obtain information about broker-dealers, insurance companies, and futures merchants.
Independence also requires that the environment where monetary policy operates is such that a successful monetary policy is possible and viable. And this is where it becomes really interesting and where the present very low inflation environment makes a difference. We usually distinguish two such threats to independence. They are called “fiscal dominance“, and “financial dominance”.