Ron Paul sets his Fed hearing panel

Paul, who heads the House Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee overseeing the Fed, will hold his first hearing in the position Wednesday. A longtime critic of the Fed who has argued the central bank should be abolished, Paul will explore at the hearing whether the Fed’s monetary policy adversely affects job creation and employment.

“While many focus on the impact of fiscal policies on employment, the effect of monetary policy often goes unexamined,” he said Monday. “In my view we are now experiencing the bust that inevitably results from the misallocation of capital and human resources in a period of artificially cheap credit. It is important to understand the Federal Reserve’s role in creating today’s unemployment crisis, while also highlighting that high unemployment and low economic growth can persist even in the face of tremendous monetary inflation.”

Aiding him in that effort will be Thomas DiLorenzo, an economic professor at the Sellinger School of Business at Loyola University, Richard Vedder, an economic professor from Ohio University, and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute.

The first two economists have ties to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian group that has been critical of the Fed and has a close relationship with Paul. DiLorenzo is listed as a senior fellow of the institute, and Vedder is an adjunct scholar, according to the group’s website.

Bivens will likely offer an alternative take from the debate. He comes from a left-leaning think tank and has argued that the Fed’s “quantitative easing” efforts, which Republicans have decried as risking high inflation, have not gone far enough.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough,” he told CNNMoney.com last year. “So it’s tough to be a cheerleader for it.”

This post updated at 5:14 pm.