[9] He was honored at the award dinner by President George W. Bush, who remarked, "I know I'm not the featured speaker; I'm just a warm-up act for Allan Meltzer.

Controversy over the majority's arguments and recommendations continued after the report's publication: critics, including David de Ferranti, a former Vice President at the World Bank, argued inter alia that the majority's report reflected ideological preconceptions rather than any demonstrated understanding of how the World Bank actually works, including the extensive complementarities between World Bank programs and private sector investment in developing countries.

The Commission's report is defended by Meltzer's chief advisor Adam Lerrick and critiqued by de Ferranti in their respective chapters in an edited volume published by the Center for Global Development and fully accessible on the web.

[12] Meltzer was critical of the Federal Reserve's decision to rescue the leading bond-insurer AIG when it did so in 2008, and said that "these disasters should be headed off early, or should be left to the marketplace to settle.

He said, "After 30 years of bailing out almost all large financial firms, the Fed made the horrendous mistake of changing its policy in the midst of a recession...

"[15] Four years after Meltzer's comment, with the Fed's quantitative easing program still continuing, US inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI-U) was running at a year-on-year rate of 1.4%,[16] while expected inflation over a 10-year period, as estimated by the Cleveland Federal Reserve, was running at around 1.6%.

[24] Meltzer has opposed adoption of a "cap and trade" scheme for carbon emissions, designed to help combat global climate change.