Fed Economists Coerced by the CCP to Provide Sensitive Economic Information

A special investigative report published by the US Congress has revealed that the Chinese Communist Party has long infiltrated the Federal Reserve. Under the guise of “talent recruitment,” the CCP is trying to build a network of informants within the Fed system, known as the “P-Network”. A Fed economist was detained four times by Chinese officials while visiting Communist China and was threatened to hand over sensitive non-public American economic data.

 The report cited the findings of an internal Fed investigation that began in 2015 and identified 13 people involved who were employed by 8 of the Fed’s 12 regional banks.

 The report details multiple instances involving “P-Network” personnel, including someone handing over macroeconomic model codes to a Chinese university with ties to the People’s Bank of China; and at least two attempts to transfer large amounts of data from the Fed to an external website from a man who had previously been asked by Chinese government spies to provide non-public information on three Fed bank presidents’ views on rate hikes.

 A media report pointed out that the investigation, sponsored by the Senate Homeland Security Department and Republicans on the Government Affairs Committee, found that the CCP has been asking some Federal Reserve employees for more than a decade to provide information about the U.S. economy, information on interest rate changes and policies, and offer them contracts for talent acquisition programs, including a large amount of cash. U.S. counterintelligence officials also confirmed that the CCP’s large-scale campaign to obtain U.S. government information, trade secrets, and scientific research results often uses “talent recruitment” as a guise.

 Senator Rob Portman, a senior Republican in the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that he was concerned about the threat to the Federal Reserve and said he hoped the investigation would wake the Fed to the awareness of Chinese threat on U.S. monetary policy.