It often feels like the only people who talk about the Federal Reserve are bankers and cranks. The former pay attention because they have to, reading into every utterance from monetary authorities for clues about which way the financial markets might soon track, fearful of falling one step behind the herd. The latter are simply bizarre. They would just as well abolish the thing, and probably burn all paper money while they’re at it.

There are of course a few more voices in the mix. Progressives have been engaged, even if their efforts rarely make the front page. During his presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders demanded greater transparency within and democratic control over the Federal Reserve. A decade earlier, then-Representative Sanders challenged then Fed Chair Alan Greenspan to “meet real people” before formulating monetary policy, because the “country clubs and the cocktail parties are the exception, not the rule.”

More recently, Elizabeth Warren has implored the Fed to force an overhaul of the leadership of banks like Wells Fargo. The scholars Dean Baker, Sarah Rawlins, and David Stein have sought to recover the legacy of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978, which tasked the central bank with attending to employment maximization as much as it does price stability. And in the most dynamic grassroots campaign for a progressive monetary policy in a generation, activists with Fed Up have conducted popular education programs and direct actions aimed at shifting the terms of debate on a topic that the financial elite would prefer to remain inaccessible to ordinary people.