The only wild cards that might potentially mitigate this built-in regulatory capture are the residual academic members of the boards, primarily economists. Yet most observers then miss how the Fed system facilitates repeated indelicate liaisons between financial executives and the economics profession, and brings about "cognitive capture" of the discipline. One way this happens is that large financial firms are induced to hire prominent academics, even to the extent of incorporating them onto their own boards, as we shall see below. It thus remains opaque exactly the constituency any given economist actually "represents" while nominally propounding the general welfare. Another significant way this occurs takes place by the Fed itself either hiring or providing contract funding for a substantial proportion of the economics profession concerned with macroeconomics and monetary economics.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 524