This excerpt originally appeared in Politico on June 19, 2012.

OFR “may decide that it needs to monitor the transfers that we make among bank accounts,” Hester Peirce, a former Securities and Exchange Commission counsel, recently wrote, “the type of insurance we are buying, our ATM withdrawals, and the rate at which we are paying off our credit card debt and car loans. The only limit on this power is the self-restraint of the director, who has ‘sole discretion’ over how to do his job.”