Word: feds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During troubled times in the ancient Greek colonies, poor men would volunteer to be scapegoats. Each was housed and well fed by the authorities, and then...
...points. A few weeks ago, ABC profiled a subject that would have been unthinkably arcane before the onset of the recession: the arbiter of the nation's money supply, the Federal Reserve System. Correspondents Cordtz and Mike Connor blamed the recession not mainly on Reagan but on the Fed's tight-money policy that had been introduced to stem inflation. Indeed, ABC asked whether the independent Fed should be more closely controlled by elected Government...
Such was the scheme of Theode C. Langevin, 34, a six-year employee of the Federal Reserve Board who moved to E.F. Hutton in mid-November. During his last 18 months at the Fed, Langevin, a $37,300-a-year economist, was given daily access to the central bank's computer by telephone. When Langevin left his Washington job, his access code was canceled, but he had arranged to learn the code number of an unwitting colleague. On his very first day at his approximately $60,000-a-year job at Hutton, Langevin punched the number into a push...
Only a day later, Langevin's ruse was discovered. His illegal tap had been recorded on a log maintained by the computer and printed out daily. A supervisor scanned the list and discovered that the Fed worker whose number Langevin had lifted was on vacation. As soon as that worker was cleared, the Fed set a trap. It created fictitious money-supply data and then rigged the computer telephone line with a tracing device. When Langevin made his next call, he was caught. Says a Fed official: "He walked into the henhouse to steal some chickens, and the gate...
...Fed's computer has been compromised once before. In 1975 an employee gave Consumer Reports a printout of bank interest charges, which the magazine subsequently printed. Ironically, Langevin stood little chance of profiting from his purloined data. Since last October, the Fed has been giving much less weight to the money supply in formulating policy. When Langevin was performing his electronic theft, the information was worth less than at any time in the past three years...