Despite stonewalling by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his cronies in the moneyed institutions of privilege, the recent partial Fed audit and dribbled-out documents sought by news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act are revealing an astounding level of corruption in the institution.
There is a revolving door between the Fed boards and the “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions like Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, etc. This, of course, we knew. What we didn’t know — but suspected — was the speed at which the door revolved.
At the time we were being warned by President George W. Bush and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) that something had to be done to save the large financial institutions that were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy because of their own debauchery, there were 18 Federal Reserve Board members who were previously high-level executives of the “too big to fails” that were in line to receive the bailouts, according to a GAO report. And 76 percent of Fed board members also own or owned stock in those same institutions.
After spending time on the Fed board and determining whether those financial institutions lived or died and acquiring insider information available only to Fed board members, those members then return to the banks as executives who set the future policy for those banks. Now, according to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the top six financial entities have assets the equivalent of 65 percent of the United States gross domestic product.
While laws in Europe and Australia prevent their central bank board members from similar conflicts of interest, there are no such laws regulating Federal Reserve board members.
The Federal Reserve is a criminal enterprise that is looting the savings and investments of Americans for the benefit of a privileged elite class. Very few people understand this, even though I and others have been saying it for many years, enduring ridicule and disdain all the while. But thanks to the efforts of people like Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul in Congress, and a very few diligent reporters like Dylan Ratigan, the truth is getting into the mainstream for all to see.
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Send your submissions to yousoundoff@personalliberty.com. Please include your name, address and telephone number (only your name will be published) so we can contact you if we need to clarify something. Anonymous submissions will not be considered.–BL
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants to change coins and stop printing bills.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wants to change the materials used to make coins and replace paper money with digits on the computer (electronic transactions).
According to Geithner, it now costs 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents to make a nickel because rising commodity prices have driven up production costs.
Why are commodity prices rising? Because of inflation created by the Federal Reserve’s money printing. According to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, the Fed bought 61 percent of the total debt issued by the Treasury Department last year.
“The Fed is in effect subsidizing U.S. government spending and borrowing via expansion of its balance sheet and massive purchases of Treasury bonds. This keeps Treasury interest rates abnormally low, camouflaging the true size of the budget deficit,” former Treasury official Lawrence Goodman wrote.
So Fed policies of moving debt around, paying debt with more debt and money printing gives Congress (and Americans) a sense that — even though the deficit is tremendous — it’s not as bad as it really is. Inflation has gotten out of hand and it’s driving up the cost of the money Americans use, so Geithner believes it’s time to steer America into a cashless economy, under the guise of saving what has become a piddling $75 million.
Don’t buy into Geithner’s lie. The goal is to eliminate the underground cash economy and make a way of tracking all purchases in order to collect more taxes.
The elites in government won’t be content until they have stolen every penny possible from every American. The underground cash economy can’t be tracked and, therefore, can’t be taxed. It’s yet another effort to stave off the economic collapse they’ve set in motion.
And, if all purchases become electronic, government will know what everyone is doing. As Gary North writes in his Tea Party Economist blog: “The ATM is our friend. No matter how hard the government tries to stamp out paper currency, people will use it. They buy freedom with it. They buy privacy.”
Seeking to corrupt the minds of inexperienced students and others in the audience at George Washington University, Federal Reserve Commissar Ben Bernanke gave the official Keynesian-socialist version of the benefits of inflationary wrecking of people’s lifetime savings and standards of living.
Nowhere does he acknowledge that every major economic bubble-bursting since establishment of the Fed in 1913 has been funded by the Fed’s over-expansion of the money supply. Our housing bubble and accumulation of crushing consumer debt was fostered and amplified by the Fed’s creation of fiat money.
The gold standard didn’t work, Commissar Bernanke opined, because it interfered with the Fed’s ability to play god with the economy. It is apparently unimportant to him that the value of the dollar and prices remained stable under a gold standard, the economy boomed, and people’s living conditions improved rapidly.
If one is a liberal-progressive-socialist, this sort of thing is intolerable. It stands in the way of reducing Americans to complete dependence upon our socialized government.
Read this New York Suneditorial for sunlight on the dark recesses of Commissar Bernanke’s speech promoting subscriptions to Pravda.
I have not been kind to Ron Paul and his participation in the Republican primary campaigns and it has taken me a while to understand why he is doing this. It is clear that he wants to be around to influence the Republican platform and the issue about which he is abundantly correct is the Federal Reserve.
Anyone taking notice of Obama’s latest budget has to conclude that his mission is to crash the nation’s economy and turn America into a Socialist worker’s paradise. The only problem is that Socialism has been a dismal failure everywhere it has been tried.
One only has to look at the collapse of the Soviet Union for confirmation of that, the Chinese abandonment of Communist economic theory, and Obama’s odd notion that a nation can spend itself out of ever-increasing debt.
I am not a fan of Paul’s isolationism, but he is absolutely right about getting rid of the Federal Reserve.
Established in 1913, the same year income taxes were instituted, the Reserve is not part of the federal government. It is, in fact, privately owned by a consortium of banks and that might include foreign banks as well.
In a remarkable essay, “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve” by Michael T. Snyder, it is clear that the Constitution intended to have the U.S. Treasury to be soley responsible to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
Synder points out that the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) is a privately owned banking cartel and one granted the right to create money out of thin air.
It is, says Synder “a perpetual debt machine because “whenever more money is created, more debt is created as well.” On top of its ability to create money, the government then borrows it, increasing the cost to taxpayers by way of the interest that must be paid to the Fed.
The government issues U.S. Treasury bonds with which to secure a loan from the Fed and it, in turn, sells them to others. Money from nothing; interest on that money, and earnings from the U.S. Treasury bonds it then sells!
Synder noted that in fiscal 2011 the U.S. government paid out $454 billion just in interest on the national debt. “The truth is that our current debt-based monetary system was designed by greedy bankers that wanted to make enormous profits by using the Federal Reserve as a tool to create money out of thin air and lend it to the U.S. government at interest.”
“On July 1, 1914 (a few months after the Fed was created) the U.S. national debt was $2.9 billion dollars. Today it is more than 5,000 times larger.”
If Rep. Paul can convince enough people to end the Federal Reserve Americans might actually learn how many trillions it loans to “too big to fail” Wall Street banking institutions as well as to foreign banks, generally without oversight by the Congress.
The previous Chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, confessed to be totally astonished by the housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis, His successor, Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Fed, has been consistently wrong about the economy since taking office.
There isn’t much for Fed officials to laugh about anymore.
As the housing bubble expanded in the run-up to its inevitable crash, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee meetings became a veritable laugh fest.
Scribes have been perusing transcripts from FOMC meetings up to 2006 that the Fed released in January. They have found that, as the bubble expanded, the giddiness in the meetings likewise increased.
According to a blog called The Daily Stag, stenographers recorded an average of 16.5 guffaws per meeting in 2000. But by 2006, the knee-slappers had increased to 43.875 per meeting.
Beard jokes: (Mr. Poole: “Okay. Mr. Chairman, it is a great delight to see a 200 percent increase in the number of beards around this table.[Laughter]“)
Nerd humor: (“Again, within the normal errors of Okun’s law—despite its name “law,” it’s a pretty loose empirical relationship[Laughter]“)
Then there are these, which demonstrate the joke was really on us:
From the meeting of Jan. 31, 2006: “Needless to say, it’s fitting for Chairman Greenspan to leave office with the economy in such solid shape. And if I might torture a simile, I would say, Mr. Chairman, that the situation you’re handing off to your successor is a lot like a tennis racquet with a gigantic sweet spot.[Laughter]”
And, from Vice Chairman Timothy Geithner in the same meeting: “I’d like the record to show that I think you’re [Greenspan] pretty terrific, too.[Laughter] And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative.[Laughter] With that, the economy looks pretty good to us, perhaps a bit better than it did at the last meeting. With the near-term monetary policy path that’s now priced into the markets, we think the economy is likely to grow slightly above trend in ’06 and close to trend in ’07…”
It’s easy to think of these guys as just evil, which they are. But doesn’t this exchange between Ben Bernanke and Greenspan in May 2004 prove they’re also incompetent? “Hey, Boss, there’s this 2,600sf house downtown selling for $839k. Sweet deal, but it’s a bit of a stretch, you think I should hold off?” Greenspan told him to go for it, and be sure to get an adjustable rate mortgage that resets after three years.
He did, and now he’s stuck with a house that’s worth no more than it was then, just like the rest of us.
These jokesters know nothing more than how to create bubbles that eventually burst. But Ron Paul warned them all for years that what they were doing was going to lead to a crash. He didn’t know because he’s prescient. He knew because he understands Austrian economic theory.
It was the Keynesians who were caught with their pants down. It would make for a good joke if weren’t so sad — especially considering that Bernanke is doing it to us again by keeping interest rates at near zero for the foreseeable future.
Bernanke’s press conference announcement again booted the stock and bond markets, but did nothing to boost employment.
At his January 25, 2012, press conference, Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke stated that he expects the Fed to continue imposing near-zero interest rates well into 2014 on short-term Treasury securities. In response, the stock market surged, despite expectations of generally lower corporate earnings and reduced consumer spending. Loose credit and low interest rates usually facilitate stock market speculation.
However gratifying this may to individual investors and pension fund managers, it does little if anything to restore production of goods and services or to raise employment. It also continues to penalize increased savings, which alone provides a stable, long-term platform for economic growth. People living on fixed incomes have had their rates of income on saving chopped around 75% since the Fed first cut interest rates.
As Austrian school economists long have observed, central bank manipulation of interest rates and government deficit spending has an uneven impact on sectors of the economy. When unemployment is high and people are yet freighted with excessive personal debt, consumer spending will be among the last sectors to increase. Instead, deficit spending and loose money lead businessmen to over-invest in long term capital goods, because low interest cost for borrowed money makes even marginal investment projects appear profitable. When business finally revives and costs, including interest rates, increase, those marginal projects collapse and push the economy into recession.
Such was the genesis and progress of the housing bubble and subprime mortgage securities.
Contrary to the aggregate computer models of Keynesian economics, the economy as a whole never has been controllable via government stimulus spending. In fact, as reported recently, the 31% increase in business long-term investment over recent months has been largely concentrated in labor-saving equipment, which ironically adds to unemployment or postpones new hiring.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was likely to raise interest rates at the end of 2014, but not until then, adding another 18 months to the expected duration of its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis.
The announcement means that the Fed does not expect the economy to complete its recovery from the 2008 crisis over the next three years. By holding short-term rates near zero beyond mid-2013, its previous estimate, the Fed hopes to hasten that process somewhat by reducing the cost of borrowing.
The Fed said in a statement that the economy had expanded “moderately” in recent weeks, but that unemployment remained at a high level, the housing sector remained in a deep depression, and the possibility of a new financial crisis in Europe continued to threaten the domestic economy.
The statement, released after a two-day meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee, said that the Fed intended to keep rates near zero until late 2014.
The economy is expected to grow at a rate of 2.2 to 2.7 percent for this year, and unemployment is expected to remain at 8.2 percent, down from the current 8.5 percent but not at a level that would indicate robust job growth.
Maybe Republicans can make some political hay out of this. Seriously, the GOP will be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory if they lose.
The Federal Reserve, among other things, is charged with managing the economy to prevent unemployment. Recently released transcripts of Fed meetings in 2006 demonstrate that even a well-informed elite group of regulators cannot do the job.
The Fed failed completely to foresee the 2007-2008 housing meltdown and the collapse of the financial system. The Fed failed completely to foresee the dot.com boom-and-burst that threw the economy into recession at the end of President Clinton’s tenure. The Fed failed completely to foresee the stagflation of the 1970s (it was, in fact, proclaiming its success at fine-tuning the economy using Keynesian economic tactics). The Fed pumped up the money supply sharply during the 1920s, failing completely to foresee the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
The following excerpts from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal bring us up to date on the dangerous folly of allowing the Fed to attempt management of the economy, particularly when it espouses the Keynesian belief that financing the government’s deficit spending will automatically end a recession without inflationary distortions to people’s standards of living.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and most of his colleagues showed little concern when house prices started to decline in 2006, predicting “a soft landing” in the then-strong U.S. economy, transcripts from the central bank released Thursday show.
Bernanke, who took over from Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman in February 2006, is cautious in making forecasts about housing and the wider economy. But, together with then New York Fed chief Timothy Geither, he believes the slowdown in housing is healthy and likely to end well.
MAR. 27-28: In Bernanke’s first meeting as Fed chairman, housing looms as a risk, but officials haven’t grasped the severity of the threat. The Fed’s chief economist, David Stockton, offers some ominous warnings. “Right now, it feels a bit like riding a roller coaster with one’s eyes shut,” when discussing his forecast for a modest slowdown in housing. “We sense that we’re going over the top, but we just don’t know what lies below.” Later, he notes that housing is “the most salient risk” to the economy. “I just don’t know how to forecast those prices,” he says of housing prices.
“Again, I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market, but I do want us to be prepared for some quarter-to-quarter fluctuations,” Bernanke says. He identifies housing as a crucial issue, but adds that he agrees “with most of the commentary that the strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing.
Timothy Geithner, who is now Treasury Secretary and was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, doesn’t see the parallel risks building in the financial system. “Equity prices and credit spreads suggest considerable confidence in the prospect for growth,” he says. “Overall financial conditions seem pretty supportive of the expansion.”
In terms of policy, Bernanke picks up where predecessor Greenspan left off: with another quarter-point boost in interest rates, and a hint of more to come.
But he puts a modest stamp of his own on the Fed’s closely watched post-meeting statement, by including a more explicit view of where the nation’s economy is headed.
Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, some (most) members of Congress and big banksters around the globe are breathing a sigh of relief today. A poll shows most Americans are now blaming President Barack Obama for killing the economy.
For three years, Obama and a complicit media have done a good job of blaming Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, for the dire state of the economy. After all, the meme goes, Bush spent money willy-nilly, cut taxes and got us into expensive wars. But Obama has spent more money and started more wars than Bush. So now there’s a new scapegoat.
The aforementioned group of elites and their string-pullers are quite happy with the news because, as long as Americans remain in their stupor, nothing will change. Americans will blame this President or that, but they will never go to the root of the problem for a solution. And it’s a problem that must be removed root and branch.
That’s why they’re working so hard to defeat Ron Paul. He knows where the problem lies, and he’s said he’s willing to remove it root and branch.
The problem is the Federal Reserve and its insidious inflationary policies. Not one person in a million understands this.
Some Americans call America a republic. After all, Benjamin Franklin responded to the question about the new government as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by saying, “[It’s] A Republic, if you can keep it.” And Article 4 Section 4 of the Constitution guarantees each State a Republican form of government.
But most people now call America a democracy. They are wrong, but not for the reasons you may think. They are wrong because America is fascism under the feel-good misnomer of democracy. It is simply Nazism with a pretty face.
The rule of law is gone. Our lawmakers make laws for us to live under while exempting themselves. They game the system. Many enter the Congress as paupers and leave rich. The rich get richer. How that happened was hidden for years by the corporate media.
Now, everyone knows what we have said for years: The President and Congress are owned lock, stock and barrel by Wall Street and the big corporations. They play for pay. And they stack the deck against the American people.
We know they (legally, though immorally) trade in the market on insider information. You and I would go to jail for this. Members of Congress apologize, feign contrition and say they will pass laws so they won’t do it again. But there is no recompense, no repentance. The fox is guarding the henhouse.
But the light is shining on them now. The Internet has allowed the free flow of information to make this possible. No more can the corporate media hide the malfeasance of governance from us. So they are working on laws to kill the Internet, too.
Unfortunately, many people see but they still do not comprehend. Goldman Sachs rules the world, but most people are clueless.
Paulson, Robert Rubin, Jon Corzine, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, European Central Bank Governor Mario Draghi and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti are just a few Goldman alums.
For decades, this nation has been held hostage by countries that do not like us. Over federal regulation has created a wall between our God given natural energy resources and energy producers. We must tear down this wall! The "Made in America" energy plan will make this country energy independent, and we can do it in 9 years! www.cainconnections.com
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