I believe that the expertise we have developed in supervising large, diversified, and interconnected banking organizations, together with our broad knowledge of the financial markets in which these organizations operate, makes the Federal Reserve well suited to serve as the consolidated supervisor for those systemically important financial institutions that may not already be subject to the Bank Holding Company Act.
First, monetary policy is made in real time, not with the benefit of hindsight, and any evaluation of competing strategies for the systematic conduct of policy must be grounded in that fact. Although we must learn from history, we cannot implement policy strategies that assume more information about the future than we can ever have.