Description
Though portrayed as a neutral technocratic institution, the Federal Reserve actively governs the moral and normative foundations of the economy. This paper examines the Fed as an institution of neoliberal governmentality, showing how it constructs economic discipline as a moral duty rather than a political choice. Drawing on Polanyi’s view that the economy is embedded in social relations, the paper argues that the Fed deploys a depoliticising moral discourse to institutionalise market-oriented norms of restraint, responsibility, and self-governance. Using a discursive institutionalist framework, it analyses Congressional testimony by Federal Reserve Chairs from 1979 to 2012 to trace how moral vocabularies, of courage, prudence, and sacrifice, are woven into the technical language of monetary policy. This moralisation of economic governance enables the Fed to produce and legitimate the self-disciplining neoliberal subject, thereby sustaining neoliberal resilience through the politics of moral legitimacy.
