New DVDs By Michael Snyder
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 Ben Bernanke has decided that he needs to teach all of us why the Federal Reserve is good for America and about why the gold standard is bad. On Tuesday, Bernanke delivered the first of four planned lectures to a group of students at George Washington University. But that lecture was not just for the benefit of those students. Officials at the Fed have long planned for this lecture series to be an opportunity for Bernanke to “educate” the American people about the Federal Reserve. The classroom was absolutely packed with reporters and just about every major news organization is running a story about this first lecture. So the Federal Reserve is definitely getting the publicity that it was hoping for. You can see the slides from the presentation that Bernanke gave to the students right here. It is pretty obvious that one of the primary goals of this first lecture was to attack those that have been critical of the Fed over the past few years. In doing so, Bernanke “stretched” the truth on more than one occasion.
The entire event was staged to make Bernanke and the Federal Reserve look as good as possible. Prior to his arrival, the students gathered for the lecture were actually instructed to applaud Bernanke….
The 30 undergraduates at George Washington University sent up a round of applause. It was, they’d been told beforehand, “appropriate, even encouraged, to politely applaud” Tuesday’s guest lecturer.
But as noted above, this lecture was not for the benefit of those students. A USA Today article even admitted that “addressing the public directly” was one of the real goals of this lecture….
For Bernanke, the GW lectures serve a dual function:
They give him a chance to reprise the role of professor he played for more than two decades, first at Stanford and then at Princeton, where he eventually chaired the economics department.
And they give him a way to expand his mission of demystifying the Fed. As part of that campaign, Bernanke became the first Fed chief to hold regular news conferences and conduct town-hall meetings.
In addressing the public directly, Bernanke has also sought to neutralize attacks on the Fed, some of them from Republican presidential candidates.
So what did Bernanke actually say during the lecture?
Well, you can read all of the slides right here, but the following are some of the highlights….
On page 6 of the presentation, Bernanke makes the following claim….
“A central bank is not an ordinary commercial bank, but a government agency.”
Well, that is quite interesting considering the fact that the Federal Reserve has argued in court that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is not an agency of the federal government and that the various Federal Reserve banks around the country are private corporations with private funding.
So did the Federal Reserve lie to the court or is Ben Bernanke lying to us?
And what other “agency” of the federal government is owned by private banks?
It is even admitted that the individual member banks own shares of stock in the various Federal Reserve banks on the Federal Reserve website….
The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations–possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.
The Federal Reserve always talks about how it must be “independent” and “above politics”, but when they start getting criticized they always want to seek shelter under the wing of the federal government.
It really is disgusting.
On page 7 of the presentation, the following statement is made….
“All central banks strive for low and stable inflation; most also try to promote stable growth in output and employment.”
Well, on both counts the Federal Reserve has failed miserably.
Right now, if inflation was measured the same way that it was back in 1980, the annual rate of inflation would be more than 10 percent.
And when you take a longer view of things, the inflation that the Federal Reserve has manufactured has been absolutely horrific.
Even using the doctored inflation numbers that the Federal Reserve gives us, the U.S. dollar has still lost 83 percent of its value since 1970.
The truth is that inflation is a “hidden tax” that is constantly destroying the value of every single dollar that you and I hold. Those that attempt to save money for the future or for retirement are deeply penalized under such a system.
As far as employment goes, the total number of workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States is larger than the entire population of Portugal.
The average duration of unemployment is hovering near an all-time record high and almost every measure of government dependence is at an all-time record high.
So the Federal Reserve is failing at the exact things that Bernanke claims that it is supposed to be doing.
But instead of directly addressing many of the specific criticisms that have been leveled at the Fed, Bernanke instead chose to spend much of his lecture talking about the problems with adopting a gold standard. The following are statements that were pulled directly off of the slides he used during his speech….
-“The gold standard sets the money supply and price level generally with limited central bank intervention.”
-“The strength of a gold standard is its greatest weakness too: Because the money supply is determined by the supply of gold, it cannot be adjusted in response to changing economic conditions.”
-“All countries on the gold standard are forced to maintain fixed exchange rates. As a result, the effects of bad policies in one country can be transmitted to other countries if both are on the gold standard.”
-“If not perfectly credible, a gold standard is subject to speculative attack and ultimate collapse as people try to exchange paper money for gold.”
-“The gold standard did not prevent frequent financial panics.”
-“Although the gold standard promoted price stability over the very long run, over the medium run it sometimes caused periods of inflation and deflation.”
-“In the second half of the 19th century, a global shortage of gold reduced the U.S. money supply and caused deflation (falling prices). Farmers were squeezed between declining prices for crops and the fixed dollar payments for their mortgages and other debts.”
Bernanke spent more time on the gold standard during his speech than on anything else. At one point during the lecture, Bernanke made the following statement….
“To have a gold standard, you have to go to South Africa or someplace and dig up tons of gold and move it to New York and put it in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and that’s a lot of effort and work”
Bernanke even blamed the gold standard for the Great Depression. On a slide entitled “Monetary Policy in the Great Depression”, Bernanke made the following claims….
•The Fed’s tight monetary policy led to sharply falling prices and steep declines in output and employment.
•The effects of policy errors here and abroad were transmitted globally through the gold standard.
•The Fed kept money tight in part because it wanted to preserve the gold standard. When FDR abandoned the gold standard in 1933, monetary policy became less tight and deflation stopped.
Bernanke seems to want to frame the debate over monetary policy is such a way that the American people are given only two alternative systems to consider: the Federal Reserve and a gold standard.
But the truth is that there are a vast array of both “hard money” and “soft money” systems that would not include a central bank or a gold standard at all.
So the truth is that the American people would have many different systems to choose from if they wanted to shut down the Federal Reserve and set up something new.
In the past the U.S. government has issued debt-free money and it could certainly do so again.
But in his lecture, Bernanke did not even mention how the Federal Reserve creates money or how whenever new money is created more debt is created.
Under the Federal Reserve system, the money supply is designed to continually increase, and whenever more money is created more debt is also created.
In a previous article I discussed how more money is created on the federal level….
For example, whenever the U.S. government wants to spend more money than it takes in (which happens constantly), it has to go ask the Federal Reserve for it. The federal government gives U.S. Treasury bonds to the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve gives the U.S. government “Federal Reserve Notes” in return. Usually this is just done electronically.
So where does the Federal Reserve get the Federal Reserve Notes?
It just creates them out of thin air.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to create money out of thin air?
Instead of issuing money directly, the U.S. government lets the Federal Reserve create it out of thin air and then the U.S. government borrows it.
Talk about stupid.
The designers of the Federal Reserve system intended to trap the U.S. government in a debt spiral that would expand perpetually.
So has their design worked?
Well, just look at the chart below….
Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
So I guess you could say that the results have been spectacular.
The Federal Reserve system also greatly favors the big Wall Street banks that it is designed to serve.
When those big banks get into trouble, the Federal Reserve snaps into action.
According to a limited GAO audit of Fed transactions during the last financial crisis, $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve to the big Wall Street banks between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010.
The following list is taken directly from page 131 of the GAO audit report and it shows which banks received money from the Fed….
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion
What about all the rest of us?
Did we get bailed out?
No, we were told that if Wall Street was rescued that the benefits would trickle down to the rest of us.
Unfortunately, that has not exactly worked out. In article, after article, after article I have detailed the horrible economic suffering that the American people are still going through.
But what Bernanke and the Fed have done is create inflation in commodities such as oil which is affecting the household finances of nearly everyone in America.
The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is now up to $3.87. That is an all-time record high for the month of March.
So far in 2012, the price of gasoline in the United States has risen by 17 percent.
Thanks Bernanke.
Over the past several decades, every time there has been a major spike in gasoline prices in the United States, a recession has always followed. If you doubt this, just check out this amazing chart.
So will we soon see another recession?
If we are lucky. Hopefully the next downturn will not be a full-blown depression.
The truth is that the Federal Reserve does not help us avoid booms and busts. Rather, it creates them. The Fed was at the heart of the housing bubble which helped bring on the last financial crisis when it crashed, and the current ultra-low interest rate policies of the Fed are creating more bubbles which will have devastating long-term consequences.
So Bernanke does not have anything to be proud of, and his track record has been absolutely nightmarish.
Hopefully the American people will not believe the propaganda and will take an honest look at the Federal Reserve.
When you take an honest look at the Federal Reserve, there is only one rational conclusion: Congress should shut it down, lock the doors and throw away the key.
 Ronald Reagan once famously declared that inflation is a tax, but sadly most Americans did not really grasp what he was talking about. If the American people truly understood what inflation was doing to them, they would be screaming bloody murder about monetary policy. Inflation is an especially insidious tax because it is not just a tax on your income for one year. It is a continual tax on every single dollar that you own. As your money sits in the bank, it is constantly losing value. Over time, the effects of inflation can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you put 100 dollars in the bank in 1970, those same dollars today would only have about 17 percent of the purchasing power that they did back then. In essence, you were hit by an 83 percent “inflation tax” and all you did was leave your money in the bank. So who is responsible for this? Well, the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy in the United States, and the inflationary monetary policy that the Fed has gotten all of us accustomed to is taxing the living daylights out of us. This is madness, and it needs to stop.
In previous articles I have discussed how the Federal Reserve creates money. If you have not read those articles yet, you can find a few of them here, here and here.
The Federal Reserve system is designed to have the U.S. money supply expand indefinitely.
And that is exactly what has happened since 1913.
But when the money supply expands, there are very serious consequences.
Every time more money comes into existence, the dollars that you and I are already holding become less valuable because now there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services.
Right now, the U.S. government says that the annual rate of inflation is somewhere around 2 percent. Those of you that have to buy food and gas on a regular basis realize how much of a joke that is.
Thankfully, there are others out there that keep track of these statistics as well. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if inflation was measured the same way that it was back in 1980, the annual rate of inflation would be more than 10 percent right now.
But let’s use the doctored government numbers for a moment. Using the doctored numbers, what inflation has done to all of us is still absolutely horrific. Just check out the chart below. This is what the Federal Reserve was designed to do. It was designed to constantly expand the money supply and create inflation that never ends….
Most of us have been living in an inflationary environment for so long that we have come to accept it as normal.
Most Americans believe that prices are supposed to just keep going up as time goes by.
Unfortunately, we have now entered an era when prices are going up much faster than wages are. Family budgets are being squeezed tighter and tighter as the inflation tax keeps taking a bigger and bigger toll on all of our paychecks.
I remember the days when I could go into the grocery store and get a large bag of brand name potato chips for 99 cents.
I remember the days when I could get all the groceries that I needed for an entire week for 20 bucks.
Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
Have you been to the grocery store lately?
When I go to the grocery store these days I almost get the feeling that someone is going to ask me to fill out a credit application.
When I get to the checkout counter I almost get the feeling that the cashier is going to ask me if I want to pay with an arm or a leg.
But food is not the only thing going up. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row. There are millions of American families that are keeping the heat really, really low this winter in an attempt to make ends meet.
Health care is another thing that has become ridiculously expensive. During the Obama administration, worker health insurance costs have risen by 23 percent.
Has your paycheck increased by 23 percent?
Of course we all know what is happening with the price of gasoline. The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is now up to $3.72. It has increased by more than 90 percent since Barack Obama became president.
This is why so many economists get so upset when the Federal Reserve starts printing money like there is no tomorrow. Inflation is a tax that is very cruel to average American families. It destroys their wealth and it destroys the purchasing power of their paychecks.
Unfortunately, this is always what happens when a society adopts fiat currency. Our dollars are just pieces of paper backed by absolutely nothing. When more pieces of paper are printed up, the value of the pieces of paper already in existence goes down.
This is one of the reasons why so many people out there are talking about “real money” like gold and silver. Unlike fiat currency, precious metals tend to hold value over a very long period of time.
For example, it will take you about three times as much U.S. currency to buy a gallon of gasoline in 2012 as it did back in 1990.
But an ounce of silver will actually buy you more gasoline today than it did back then.
Back in 1990, an ounce of silver would buy you about 4 gallons of gasoline. Today it will buy you more than 8 gallons of gasoline.
Talk about holding value.
We see the same kind of thing happening with gold.
When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was selling for about $850. Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1700 an ounce.
It is not that gold is becoming so much more valuable. It is just that the U.S. dollar is losing value on a continual basis.
So why don’t the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve quit flooding our economy with more paper money?
That is a very good question.
Sadly, our leaders seem to have a never ending addiction to more paper money and the American people are not demanding change.
On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that the Federal Reserve may have to implement even more stimulus measures in order to help the economy.
Of course such talk is utter insanity considering what Bernanke and his cohorts have already done to the monetary base over the past few years….
Thankfully, the vast majority of that money is still trapped in the financial system. If all of that money was floating around on the street inflation would be far worse.
Those of you that think that the surging stock market is a sign of “economic recovery” should realize that the market has been pumped up by huge amounts of funny money from the Federal Reserve. Just because the number of dollars circulating has increased does not mean that things are getting better.
There is much more to all of this of course, but what is important for the man and the woman on the street is the fact that when the Federal Reserve expands the money supply it is a tax on all of us and it makes all of us poorer.
So what do you think about the inflation tax and the reckless monetary policy of the Federal Reserve?
Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….
 What would happen if the Federal Reserve was shut down permanently? That is a question that CNBC asked recently, but unfortunately most Americans don’t really think about the Fed much. Most Americans are content with believing that the Federal Reserve is just another stuffy government agency that sets our interest rates and that is watching out for the best interests of the American people. But that is not the case at all. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is a private banking cartel that has been designed to systematically destroy the value of our currency, drain the wealth of the American public and enslave the federal government to perpetually expanding debt. During this election year, the economy is the number one issue that voters are concerned about. But instead of endlessly blaming both political parties, the truth is that most of the blame should be placed at the feet of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has more power over the performance of the U.S. economy than anyone else does. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply, the Federal Reserve sets the interest rates and the Federal Reserve hands out bailouts to the big banks that absolutely dwarf anything that Congress ever did. If the American people are ever going to learn what is really going on with our economy, then it is absolutely imperative that they get educated about the Federal Reserve.
The following are 10 things that every American should know about the Federal Reserve….
#1 The Federal Reserve System Is A Privately Owned Banking Cartel
The Federal Reserve is not a government agency.
The truth is that it is a privately owned central bank. It is owned by the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve system. We do not know how much of the system each bank owns, because that has never been disclosed to the American people.
The Federal Reserve openly admits that it is privately owned. When it was defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated unequivocally in court that it was “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
In fact, if you want to find out that the Federal Reserve system is owned by the member banks, all you have to do is go to the Federal Reserve website….
The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations–possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.
Foreign governments and foreign banks do own significant ownership interests in the member banks that own the Federal Reserve system. So it would be accurate to say that the Federal Reserve is partially foreign-owned.
But until the exact ownership shares of the Federal Reserve are revealed, we will never know to what extent the Fed is foreign-owned.
#2 The Federal Reserve System Is A Perpetual Debt Machine
As long as the Federal Reserve System exists, U.S. government debt will continue to go up and up and up.
This runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that Democrats and Republicans would have us believe, but unfortunately it is true.
The way our system works, whenever more money is created more debt is created as well.
For example, whenever the U.S. government wants to spend more money than it takes in (which happens constantly), it has to go ask the Federal Reserve for it. The federal government gives U.S. Treasury bonds to the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve gives the U.S. government “Federal Reserve Notes” in return. Usually this is just done electronically.
So where does the Federal Reserve get the Federal Reserve Notes?
It just creates them out of thin air.
Wouldn’t you like to be able to create money out of thin air?
Instead of issuing money directly, the U.S. government lets the Federal Reserve create it out of thin air and then the U.S. government borrows it.
Talk about stupid.
When this new debt is created, the amount of interest that the U.S. government will eventually pay on that debt is not also created.
So where will that money come from?
Well, eventually the U.S. government will have to go back to the Federal Reserve to get even more money to finance the ever expanding debt that it has gotten itself trapped into.
It is a debt spiral that is designed to go on perpetually.
You see, the reality is that the money supply is designed to constantly expand under the Federal Reserve system. That is why we have all become accustomed to thinking of inflation as “normal”.
So what does the Federal Reserve do with the U.S. Treasury bonds that it gets from the U.S. government?
Well, it sells them off to others. There are lots of people out there that have made a ton of money by holding U.S. government debt.
In fiscal 2011, the U.S. government paid out 454 billion dollars just in interest on the national debt.
That is 454 billion dollars that was taken out of our pockets and put into the pockets of wealthy individuals and foreign governments around the globe.
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.
And that plan is working quite well.
Most Americans today don’t understand how any of this works, but many prominent Americans in the past did understand it.
For example, Thomas Edison was once quoted in the New York Times as saying the following….
That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.
But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.
We should have listened to men like Edison and Ford.
But we didn’t.
And so we pay the price.
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 more than 5000 times larger.
Yes, the perpetual debt machine is working quite well, and most Americans do not even realize what is happening.
#3 The Federal Reserve Has Destroyed More Than 96% Of The Value Of The U.S. Dollar
Did you know that the U.S. dollar has lost 96.2 percent of its value since 1900? Of course almost all of that decline has happened since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.
Because the money supply is designed to expand constantly, it is guaranteed that all of our dollars will constantly lose value.
Inflation is a “hidden tax” that continually robs us all of our wealth. The Federal Reserve always says that it is “committed” to controlling inflation, but that never seems to work out so well.
And current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says that it is actually a good thing to have a little bit of inflation. He plans to try to keep the inflation rate at about 2 percent in the coming years.
So what is so bad about 2 percent? That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?
Well, just consider the following excerpt from a recent Forbes article….
The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level.
#4 The Federal Reserve Can Bail Out Whoever It Wants To With No Accountability
The American people got so upset about the bailouts that Congress gave to the Wall Street banks and to the big automakers, but did you know that the biggest bailouts of all were given out by the Federal Reserve?
Thanks to a very limited audit of the Federal Reserve that Congress approved a while back, we learned that the Fed made trillions of dollars in secret bailout loans to the big Wall Street banks during the last financial crisis. They even secretly loaned out hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign banks.
According to the results of the limited Fed audit mentioned above, a total of $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010.
The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the audit report….
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion
So why haven’t we heard more about this?
This is scandalous.
In addition, it turns out that the Fed paid enormous sums of money to the big Wall Street banks to help “administer” these nearly interest-free loans….
Not only did the Federal Reserve give 16.1 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free loans to the “too big to fail” banks, the Fed also paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve shelled out an astounding $659.4 million in “fees” to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis in the first place.
Does reading that make you angry?
It should.
#5 The Federal Reserve Is Paying Banks Not To Lend Money
Did you know that the Federal Reserve is actually paying banks not to make loans?
It is true.
Section 128 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 allows the Federal Reserve to pay interest on “excess reserves” that U.S. banks park at the Fed.
So the banks can just send their cash to the Fed and watch the money come rolling in risk-free.
So are many banks taking advantage of this?
You tell me. Just check out the chart below. The amount of “excess reserves” parked at the Fed has gone from nearly nothing to about 1.5 trillion dollars since 2008….
But shouldn’t the banks be lending the money to us so that we can start businesses and buy homes?
You would think that is how it is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve is not working for us.
The Federal Reserve is working for the big banks.
Sadly, most Americans have no idea what is going on.
Another example of this is the government debt carry trade.
Here is how it works. The Federal Reserve lends gigantic piles of nearly interest-free cash to the big Wall Street banks, and in turn those banks use the money to buy up huge amounts of government debt. Since the return on government debt is higher, the banks are able to make large profits very easily and with very little risk.
This scam was also explained in a recent article in the Guardian….
Consider this: we pretend that banks are private businesses that should be allowed to run their own affairs. But they are the biggest scroungers of public money of our time. Banks are lent vast sums of money by central banks at near-zero interest. They lend that money to us or back to the government at higher rates and rake in the difference by the billion. They don’t even have to make clever investments to make huge profits.
That is a pretty good little scam they have got going, wouldn’t you say?
#6 The Federal Reserve Creates Artificial Economic Bubbles That Are Extremely Damaging
By allowing a centralized authority such as the Federal Reserve to dictate interest rates, it creates an environment where financial bubbles can be created very easily.
Over the past several decades, we have seen bubble after bubble. Most of these have been the result of the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates artificially low. If the free market had been setting interest rates all this time, things would have never gotten so far out of hand.
For example, the housing crash would have never been so horrific if the Federal Reserve had not created such ideal conditions for a housing bubble in the first place. But we allow the Fed to continue to make the same mistakes.
Right now, the Federal Reserve continues to set interest rates much, much lower than they should be. This is causing a tremendous misallocation of economic resources, and there will be massive consequences for that down the line.
#7 The Federal Reserve System Is Dominated By The Big Wall Street Banks
Even since it was created, the Federal Reserve system has been dominated by the big Wall Street banks.
The following is from a previous article that I did about the Fed….
The New York representative is the only permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, while other regional banks rotate in 2 and 3 year intervals. The former head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, is now U.S. Treasury Secretary. The truth is that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has always been the most important of the regional Fed banks by far, and in turn the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has always been dominated by Wall Street and the major New York banks.
#8 It Is Not An Accident That We Saw The Personal Income Tax And The Federal Reserve System Both Come Into Existence In 1913
On February 3rd, 1913 the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Later that year, the United States Revenue Act of 1913 imposed a personal income tax on the American people and we have had one ever since.
Without a personal income tax, it is hard to have a central bank. It takes a lot of money to finance all of the government debt that a central banking system creates.
It is no accident that the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913 and the Federal Reserve system was also created in 1913.
They have a symbiotic relationship and they are designed to work together.
We could fill Congress with people that are committed to ending this oppressive system, but so far we have chosen not to do that.
So our children and our grandchildren will face a lifetime of debt slavery because of us.
I am sure they will be thankful for that.
#9 The Current Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, Has A Nightmarish Track Record Of Incompetence
The mainstream media portrays Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as a brilliant economist, but is that really the case?
Let’s go to the videotape.
The following is an extended excerpt from an article that I published previously….
———-
In 2005, Bernanke said that we shouldn’t worry because housing prices had never declined on a nationwide basis before and he said that he believed that the U.S. would continue to experience close to “full employment”….
“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”
In 2005, Bernanke also said that he believed that derivatives were perfectly safe and posed no danger to financial markets….
“With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.”
In 2006, Bernanke said that housing prices would probably keep rising….
“Housing markets are cooling a bit. Our expectation is that the decline in activity or the slowing in activity will be moderate, that house prices will probably continue to rise.”
In 2007, Bernanke insisted that there was not a problem with subprime mortgages….
“At this juncture, however, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. In particular, mortgages to prime borrowers and fixed-rate mortgages to all classes of borrowers continue to perform well, with low rates of delinquency.”
In 2008, Bernanke said that a recession was not coming….
“The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”
A few months before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed, Bernanke insisted that they were totally secure….
“The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.”
For many more examples that demonstrate the absolutely nightmarish track record of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, please see the following articles….
*”Say What? 30 Ben Bernanke Quotes That Are So Stupid That You Won’t Know Whether To Laugh Or Cry”
*”Is Ben Bernanke A Liar, A Lunatic Or Is He Just Completely And Totally Incompetent?”
But after being wrong over and over and over, Barack Obama still nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Chairman of the Fed.
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#10 The Federal Reserve Has Become Way Too Powerful
The Federal Reserve is the most undemocratic institution in America.
The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as “the fourth branch of government”, but there are less checks and balances on the Fed than there are on the other three branches.
The Federal Reserve runs the U.S. economy but it is not accountable to the American people. We can’t vote those that run the Fed out of office if we do not like what they do.
Yes, the president appoints those that run the Fed, but he also knows that if he does not tread lightly he won’t get the money from the big Wall Street banks that he needs for his next election.
Thankfully, there are a few members of Congress that are complaining about how much power the Fed has. For example, Ron Paul once told MSNBC that he believes that the Federal Reserve is now actually more powerful than Congress…..
“The regulations should be on the Federal Reserve. We should have transparency of the Federal Reserve. They can create trillions of dollars to bail out their friends, and we don’t even have any transparency of this. They’re more powerful than the Congress.”
As members of Congress such as Ron Paul have started to shed some light on the activities of the Federal Reserve, that has caused many in the mainstream media to come to the defense of the Fed.
For example, a recent CNBC article entitled “If The Federal Reserve Is Abolished, What Then?” makes it sound like there is absolutely no other rational alternative to having the Federal Reserve run our economy.
But this is not what our founders intended.
The founders did not intend for a private banking cartel to issue our money and set our interest rates for us.
According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress has been given the responsibility to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?
But the CNBC article mentioned above makes it sound like the sky would fall if control of the currency was handed back over to the American people.
At one point, the article asks the following question….
“How would the U.S. economy then function? Something has to take its place, right?”
No, the truth is that we don’t need anyone to “manage” our economy.
The U.S. Treasury could be in charge of issuing our currency and the free market could set our interest rates.
We don’t need to have a centrally-planned economy.
We aren’t China.
And it goes against everything that our founders believed to be running up so much government debt.
For example, Thomas Jefferson once declared that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing….
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
Oh, how things would have been different if we had only listened to Thomas Jefferson.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. These are things that every American should know about the Federal Reserve, and we need to educate the American people about the Fed while there is still time.
 Most Americans have no idea that the U.S. government once issued debt-free money directly into circulation. America once thrived under a debt-free monetary system, and we can do it again. The truth is that the United States is a sovereign nation and it does not need to borrow money from anyone. Back in the days of JFK, Federal Reserve Notes were not the only currency in circulation. Under JFK (at at various other times), a limited number of debt-free United States Notes were issued by the U.S. Treasury and spent by the U.S. government without any new debt being created. In fact, each bill said “United States Note” right at the top. Unfortunately, United States Notes are not being issued today. If you stop right now and pull a dollar out of your wallet, what does it say right at the top? It says “Federal Reserve Note”. Normally, the way our current system works is that whenever more Federal Reserve Notes are created more debt is also created. This debt-based monetary system is systematically destroying the wealth of this nation. But it does not have to be this way. The truth is that the U.S. government still has the power under the U.S. Constitution to issue debt-free money, and we need to educate the American people about this.
Posted below are pictures of the front and the back of a United States Note printed in 1963 while JFK was president….
Notice that there is a red seal instead of a green seal on the front, and it says “United States Note” rather than “Federal Reserve Note”.
According to Wikipedia, United States Notes were issued directly into circulation by the U.S. Treasury and they were first used during the Civil War….
They were originally issued directly into circulation by the U.S. Treasury to pay expenses incurred by the Union during the American Civil War. Over the next century, the legislation governing these notes was modified many times and numerous versions have been issued by the Treasury.
So why are we using debt-based Federal Reserve Notes today instead of debt-free United States Notes?
It seems rather stupid, doesn’t it?
Well, that is what Thomas Edison thought too.
Thomas Edison was once quoted in the New York Times as saying the following….
That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.
But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.
Our current debt-based monetary system was devised by greedy bankers that wanted to make huge profits by creating money out of thin air and lending it to the U.S. government at interest.
Sadly, the vast majority of the American people have no idea how money is actually created in this nation.
In a previous article about money and debt, I explained how more government debt is created whenever the U.S. government puts more money into circulation….
When the government wants more money, the U.S. government swaps U.S. Treasury bonds for “Federal Reserve notes”, thus creating more government debt. Usually the money isn’t even printed up – most of the time it is just electronically credited to the government. The Federal Reserve creates these “Federal Reserve notes” out of thin air. These Federal Reserve notes are backed by nothing and have no intrinsic value of their own.
When each new Federal Reserve Note is created, the interest owed by the federal government on that new Federal Reserve Note is not also created at the same time.
So the amount of government debt that is created actually exceeds the amount of money that is created.
Isn’t that a stupid system?
The U.S. Constitution says that the federal government is the one that should actually be issuing our money.
In particular, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it is the U.S. Congress that has been given the responsibility to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
So why is a private central banking cartel issuing our money?
As is the case with so many other issues, we desperately need to get back to the way the U.S. Constitution says that we should be doing things.
The debt-based Federal Reserve system is literally stealing the future from our children and our grandchildren.
Back in 1910, a couple years prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.
A little over 100 years later, our national debt is now more than 5000 times larger.
So why don’t we just admit that this system simply does not work?
Our current debt-based monetary system also requires very high personal income taxes to pay for it.
In fact, it is no accident that the personal income tax was introduced at about the same time that the Federal Reserve system originally came into existence.
Our children, our grandchildren and many generations after that are facing a lifetime of debt slavery because of us.
As I have written about previously, if the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
Neither the Republicans or the Democrats are proposing any solutions to this problem. Rather, both parties are only trying to slow down the rate at which we are going into even more debt.
But the truth is that the federal government does not have to go into a single penny of additional debt.
How could this be?
It is not too complicated.
If Congress took back the power over our currency and started issuing debt-free money a lot of our problems could be fixed.
A basic plan would look something like this….
#1) The U.S. Congress votes to take back all of the functions that it has delegated to the Federal Reserve and begins to issue debt-free United States Notes. These United States Notes would have the exact same value as existing Federal Reserve Notes, and over time all existing Federal Reserve Notes would be taken out of circulation.
#2) The U.S. Congress nationalizes all debt held by the Federal Reserve. That would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars. In fact, there are a few members of Congress that have already proposed this.
#3) A Constitutional amendment is passed limiting future U.S. government deficits to a reasonable percentage of GDP. Any future deficits would not be funded by borrowing. Rather, future deficits would be funded by newly created United States Notes. Therefore, the federal government would never again accumulate another penny of debt.
And it would be important to inject new money into the economy from time to time. When existing money is destroyed or when the population grows it is important to inject a certain amount of new money into the system in order to avoid deflation.
#4) The existing national debt would be very slowly paid off with newly created United States Notes. The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011, and over time this expense would go to zero.
If the national debt is paid off slowly enough, it would not create too much inflation. I believe that it could be paid off gradually over 50 years without shocking the economy too much.
There are some that would object to any measure that would ever cause a small amount of inflation, but my contention is that we have created a $15 trillion dollar debt mess for future generations, and it would be absolutely criminal to pass that legacy on to them.
We created this mess, and it is our responsibility to clean it up.
While there is certainly a danger that we would have a limited amount of inflation under a debt-free monetary system such as the one described above, the reality is that we are absolutely guaranteed inflation under the Federal Reserve system.
Most Americans believe that inflation is a fact of life, but the sad truth is that the United States has only had a major, ongoing problem with inflation since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.
If you do not believe this, just check out this chart.
Sadly, the U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created.
So, yes, there would be a need for strict monetary discipline under a debt-free monetary system, but it would be hard to do worse than the Federal Reserve has already been doing.
And Congress could always slow down inflation using other methods. For example, raising the reserve requirements for banks (which should be done anyway) would help keep inflation in check.
If the above proposals were adopted, the end result would be something that we could all live with. The Federal Reserve system would be abolished, the national debt burden on future generations would be wiped out, the economy would not have to go through a devastating economic collapse that could last a decade or longer, and we could eventually make a fairly smooth transition to “hard money” if we wanted to after the national debt is gone.
Is there any other proposal out there that does all of those things?
There are many out there that would dispute some of the points above, and debate is good. By engaging in debate, we can hopefully help educate the American people about the nature of money.
The key is to get rid of our current debt-based Federal Reserve Notes and replace them with debt-free United States Notes.
The American people need to understand that it is a lie that the U.S. government “must” borrow money from somebody else.
When the U.S. government borrows money, it slowly transfers wealth from the American people to those that lent it.
At this point, we have created a financial nightmare for future generations that is unlike anything the world has ever seen before. We owe it to future generations to eliminate the debt problem without destroying the United States economy. Adopting debt-free money would allow us to do that.
But sadly, neither political party is even talking about debt-free money. In fact, most of the politicians in both political parties probably do not even know what debt-free money is.
So we need to get the American people educated about these things. Because if we stay on the course that we are currently on, an economic collapse is inevitable.
 What you are about to read should absolutely astound you. During the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve secretly conducted the biggest bailout in the history of the world, and the Fed fought in court for several years to keep it a secret. Do you remember the TARP bailout? The American people were absolutely outraged that the federal government spent 700 billion dollars bailing out the “too big to fail” banks. Well, that bailout was pocket change compared to what the Federal Reserve did. As you will see documented below, the Federal Reserve actually handed more than 16 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free money to the “too big to fail” banks between 2007 and 2010. So have you heard about this on the nightly news? Probably not. Lately Bloomberg has been reporting on some of this, but even they are not giving people the whole picture. The American people need to be told about this 16 trillion dollar bailout, because it is a perfect example of why the Federal Reserve needs to be shut down. The Federal Reserve has been actively picking “winners” and “losers” in the financial system, and it turns out that the “friends” of the Fed always get bailed out and always end up among the “winners”. This is not how a free market system is supposed to work.
According to the limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the grand total of all the secret bailouts conducted by the Federal Reserve during the last financial crisis comes to a whopping $16.1 trillion.
That is an astonishing amount of money.
Keep in mind that the GDP of the United States for the entire year of 2010 was only 14.58 trillion dollars.
The total U.S. national debt is only a bit above 15 trillion dollars right now.
So 16 trillion dollars is an almost inconceivable amount of money.
But some other dollar figures have been thrown around lately regarding these secret Federal Reserve bailouts. Let’s take a look at them and see what they mean.
$1.2 Trillion
A recent Bloomberg article made the following statement….
The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The $1.2 trillion figure represents the peak outstanding balance on these loans, not the total amount of all the loans. On December 5, 2008 the “too big to fail” banks owed this much money to the Federal Reserve. Many of them could not pay these short-term loans back right away and had to keep rolling them over time after time. Each time a short-term loan got rolled over that represented a new loan.
$7.7 Trillion
Bloomberg is reporting that the Federal Reserve had made a total of $7.77 trillion in financial commitments to the big banks by the end of March 2009….
Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
But as mentioned above, a one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act covered an even broader time period and revealed even more bailout loans.
According to the GAO audit, $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The following list of firms and the amount of money that they received was taken directly from page 131 of the GAO audit report….
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion
This report was made available to all the members of Congress, but most of them have been totally silent about it. One of the only members of Congress that has said something has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
The following is an excerpt from a statement about this audit that was taken from the official website of Senator Sanders….
“As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world”
So where is everyone else?
Why aren’t leading Republicans and leading Democrats crying bloody murder over this report?
This scandal should have been front page news for months when it was revealed.
But it wasn’t.
And Guess what?
Not only did the Federal Reserve give 16.1 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free loans to the “too big to fail” banks, the Fed also paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program. According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve shelled out an astounding $659.4 million in “fees” to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis in the first place.
In addition, it turns out that trillions of dollars of this bailout money actually went overseas. According to the GAO audit, approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign banks in Europe and in Asia.
So why were our dollars being used to bail out foreign banks while tens of millions of American families were deeply suffering?
That is a very good question.
Also, it is important to remember that many of these bailout loans were made at below market interest rates, and this enabled many of these financial institutions to rake in huge profits.
According to a recent Bloomberg article, the big banks brought in an estimated $13 billion by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates….
While the Fed’s last-resort lending programs generally charge above-market interest rates to deter routine borrowing, that practice sometimes flipped during the crisis. On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.
The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.
So once the financial crisis was over, were adjustments made to the financial system to make sure that this type of thing would never happen again?
Of course not.
Today, the “too big to fail” banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
So now they are more “too big to fail” than ever.
But this is what happens when we allow unelected central bank bureaucrats to run our financial system.
Most Americans do not realize this, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve is not part of the government. In fact, it is about as “federal” as Federal Express is. The Federal Reserve has admitted that they are a privately owned institution in court many times, and you can see video of a Federal Reserve employee admitting that the Federal Reserve is privately owned right here.
The Federal Reserve is an out of control monster that is throwing around trillions of dollars whenever it wants to. Nobody should be allowed to do this. Nobody should be allowed to give bailouts to banks and corporations without the express permission of the U.S. Congress and the president of the United States.
This is a point that I made in my article yesterday. The Federal Reserve decided this week that it is going to provide “liquidity support” to Europe. If the American people do not like this move, that is just too bad. We do not get a say in the matter.
Are you starting to understand why I keep pushing the idea that it is time to shut down the Federal Reserve?
Please share this information about the secret 16 trillion dollar Federal Reserve bailout with your family and your friends.
If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still time to change the direction that this country is headed.
 The central banks of the world are acting as if it is 2008 all over again. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and right now the central bankers are pulling out all the stops. The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank have announced a coordinated plan to provide liquidity support to the global financial system. According to the plan, the Federal Reserve is going to substantially reduce the interest rate that it charges the European Central Bank to borrow dollars. In turn, that will enable the ECB to lend dollars to European banks at a much cheaper rate. The hope is that this will alleviate the credit crunch which has gripped the European financial system by the throat. So where is the Federal Reserve going to get all of these dollars that it will be loaning out at very low interest rates? You guessed it – the Fed is just going to create them out of thin air. Our currency is being debased so that Europe can be helped out. Unfortunately, the impact of this move will be mostly “psychological” because it really does nothing to address the fundamental problems that Europe is facing. It is up to Europe to solve those problems, and so far Europe has shown no signs of being able to do that.
The major central banks of the world say that they want to “enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system.” But essentially what is happening is that the Federal Reserve is going to be zapping large amounts of dollars into existence and loaning them out to the ECB very, very cheaply. Think of it as a type of “quantitative easing” on a global scale.
The decision to do this was reportedly made by the Federal Reserve on Monday morning. For the moment, this move seems to have stabilized the European financial system. It is quite unlikely that any major European banks will fail this weekend now.
But as mentioned above, this move does nothing to solve the very serious financial problems that Europe is facing. This intervention by the central banks is merely just a speed bump on the road to financial oblivion.
Most Americans are not going to understand what the central banks of the world just did, but it really is not that complicated.
The following is how CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi broke down what the central banks have done….
In an attempt to stave off the consequences of a global credit freeze, the Federal Reserve, in coordination with major central banks, has created a credit line available to those central banks, whereby they can borrow dollars at reduced interest rates for periods of three months. The central banks, in turn, can lend to commercial banks in their respective countries. This is meant to reduce the cost of short-term borrowing for troubled European banks and to give them immediate access to dollars.
This was done immediately after the collapse of Lehman Brothers as well, to alleviate the consequences of banks being largely unwilling to lend to other banks, even for short periods, for fear that the borrowing banks could fail.
Okay – so the Federal Reserve is loaning giant piles of cheap money to the European Central Bank.
So where in the world does all of that money come from?
As a CNBC article recently explained, all of this money is created right out of thin air by the Federal Reserve….
Neither the dollars nor the Euros come from anywhere. They aren’t moved or debited from anywhere. They are invented right on the spot with a few taps on the key pad. And that’s all. There’s no printing press fired up to make new dollars or euros.
This is sometimes called “fiat money.” But that makes it sound as if some command from a sovereign created the money. It’s really closer to “keyboard money,” since it is created by data entry in a computer.
Does that sound bizarre to you?
It should.
But that is how the global financial system really works.
We live in a crazy world.
So what did the financial markets of the world think of this move by the Federal Reserve?
It turns out that they absolutely loved it.
The Dow was up 490 points, and that was the biggest gain of the year so far.
Unfortunately, this stock market rally is not going to last indefinitely. If you are still in the market, enjoy this while you can because eventually a whole lot of pain is going to be coming.
Again, nothing has been solved. Europe is still in a massive amount of trouble. But the announcement did make everyone feel all “warm and fuzzy” for at least a day.
Michelle Girard, a senior economist at RBS Securities, said the following about this move….
“The impact is more psychological than anything else”
Just think of it as “comfort food” for the financial markets.
It was also a very desperate move.
In fact, some even believe that this move happened because a major European bank was in danger of failing.
Just check out some of the things that Jim Cramer of CNBC has been saying on Twitter….
If the Fed didn’t act we would have had the largest bank failure ever this weekend, i believe.
The actions the governments took today shows that there was without a doubt a major bank about to fall this weekend. That’s very dire….
I believe a major European bank would have gone under this weekend…. That’s why they did this….
An article in Forbes has also speculated that this move was made because a major European bank was in imminent danger of failing….
Did a big European bank come close to failing last night? European banks, especially French banks, rely heavily on funding in the wholesale money markets. Given the actions of the world’s largest central banks last night, it raises the question of whether a major bank was having difficulty funding its immediate liquidity needs.
Perhaps we will never know the truth, but the reality is that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank would have never taken coordinated action like this if they did not believe that there was some sort of imminent threat to the global financial system.
Sadly, this latest move is also going to have some side effects.
Pimco senior vice president Tony Crescenzi says that all of this “liquidity” is going to dramatically increase the size of the U.S. monetary base….
Keep in mind that any use of the Fed’s swap facility expands the Fed’s monetary base: all dollars, no matter where they are deposited, whether it be Kazakhstan, Japan, or Mexico, wind up back in an American bank. This means that any time a foreign central bank engages in a swap with the Federal Reserve, the Fed will create new money in order to make the swap. Use of the Fed’s liquidity swap line in late 2008 was the main cause of a surge in the Fed’s monetary base at that time. The peak for the swap line was about $600 billion in December 2008. Some observers will therefore say that the swap line is a backdoor way to engage in more quantitative easing.
When there is more money floating around out there but the same amount of goods and services, prices go up.
So will we eventually see more inflation in the United States because of all this?
That is what some are fearing.
Meanwhile, politicians in Europe have failed to come up with a plan to address the European financial crisis once again.
They are calling it a “delay”, but the truth is that it should be called a “failure”. The following comes from an article in USA Today….
The ministers delayed action on major financial issues — such as the concept of a closer fiscal union that would guarantee more budgetary discipline — until the heads of state meet next week in Brussels.
So will European politicians come up with a real plan next week in Brussels?
That seems unlikely.
The reality is that this latest move by the major central banks of the world does not change the fact that Europe is in a huge amount of trouble and is most likely headed for a very painful financial collapse.
One more thing that this latest move by the central banks of the world highlights is the fact that we do not have any control over what they do.
All of these central banks are run by unelected bureaucrats that answer to nobody. The decisions that these central bankers make affect all of our lives in a very significant way, and yet we have zero input into these decisions.
Most of the decisions that these central bankers make seem to benefit big banks and big financial institutions. They always claim that the benefits will “filter down” to the rest of us. But most of the time what ends up filtering down to us is the economic pain that comes from their bad decisions.
As I have written about so many times before, these central banks need to be abolished. The American people need to tell Congress to shut down the Federal Reserve and to start issuing debt-free United States currency.
We do not want a bunch of unelected central bankers to “centrally plan” the U.S. economy or to “centrally plan” the global economy.
The more these central bankers monkey with things, the more they mess things up.
Yes, this latest move has stabilized things for the moment, but big trouble is on the horizon for the global financial system.
Count on it.
 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is taking his show on the road in at attempt to help Americans feel better about the Federal Reserve. During a visit to the Fort Bliss headquarters of the Army’s 1st Armored Division this week, Bernanke held a town hall meeting during which he took questions from some of the soldiers. Bernanke tried to sound as compassionate as possible as he assured the soldiers that the Federal Reserve is looking out for the American people and is doing everything that it can to help create jobs. At one point, Bernanke even made the following statement: “For a lot of people, I know, it doesn’t feel like the recession ever ended.” That probably helped a lot of people feel better. A few probably even had a good cry. But what Bernanke did not explain to the troops is that the Federal Reserve is very much responsible for the fact that unemployment is rampant, for the fact that the U.S. dollar is rapidly being devalued and for the fact that we have accumulated the largest national debt in the history of the world.
Ben Bernanke keeps insisting that the Federal Reserve has two main jobs (fighting inflation and keeping unemployment low) and that it is working incredibly hard to accomplish that dual mandate. During his visit with the soldiers he told them that the Fed is very determined to create more jobs for the American people….
“We at the Federal Reserve have been focusing intently on supporting job creation.”
Well, if we are to judge the Federal Reserve by how well it has accomplished its “dual mandate”, then the Federal Reserve has been an abysmal failure.
Since the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value to inflation.
Is that something Bernanke should be proud of?
Of course not.
Okay, so the Fed has failed when it comes to keeping inflation under control.
What about jobs?
Well, the first decade of this century was the worst decade for job creation that the United States has seen since the Great Depression.
The sad truth is that a total of zero jobs were created last decade. The following is a quote from a recent article in Washington Monthly….
“If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.”
So what kind of a grade should we give the Federal Reserve for the job that it has done?
How about a big fat F?
The Federal Reserve has been a failure of epic proportions. It greatly contributed to the Great Depression (even Bernanke admits this), it created the conditions for the financial bubbles that greatly contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, and it has brought us to the verge of yet another gigantic financial crisis.
But Ben Bernanke believes that all of us that are criticizing the Fed are just ignorant. He thinks that we just don’t understand the Fed properly. During a recent question and answer session, Bernanke stated the following….
“I think that the concerns about the Fed are based on misconceptions”
Oh, if only the rest of us understood how the Fed works and how they really care about the American people. Then everything would be okay.
Not.
During that same session, Bernanke insisted that the Federal Reserve only has the purest motives….
“Our motives are strictly to do what is in the best interest of the broad public and I believe that our efforts to stabilize the financial system, which were ultimately proved successful, were very much in the interest of the broad public”
According to Bernanke, those that work at the Fed are unselfish guardians of our monetary system who are fighting for truth, justice and the American way of life.
Okay, perhaps I am exaggerating just a bit, but you get the point.
Bernanke is trying very hard to convince all of us that the Federal Reserve is just misunderstood and that we should just trust what the “experts” are doing.
So what will the plan be if the financial crisis in Europe blows up?
Well, during his visit to Fort Bliss one of the soldiers actually asked him about that. The following is his answer….
“Although the Fed would obviously do all that we could to maintain stability and to keep monetary policy as easy as necessary to try to minimize the damage, I don’t think we would be able to escape the consequences of a blow-up in Europe”
Oh, he would keep monetary policy “as easy as necessary”.
Isn’t that lovely – I bet that will be great for the value of the U.S. dollar.
Bernanke also told the soldiers that he believes that happy days are ahead for the U.S. economy….
“I do believe we will return to a healthier growth rate. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t”
So we should just trust Bernanke, right?
He has never been wrong before, right?
Well, let’s check the record….
In 2005, Bernanke said that we shouldn’t worry because housing prices had never declined on a nationwide basis before and he said that he believed that the U.S. would continue to experience close to “full employment”….
“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”
In 2005, Bernanke also said that he believed that derivatives were perfectly safe and posed no danger to financial markets….
“With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.”
In 2006, Bernanke said that housing prices would probably keep rising….
“Housing markets are cooling a bit. Our expectation is that the decline in activity or the slowing in activity will be moderate, that house prices will probably continue to rise.”
In 2007, Bernanke insisted that there was not a problem with subprime mortgages….
“At this juncture, however, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. In particular, mortgages to prime borrowers and fixed-rate mortgages to all classes of borrowers continue to perform well, with low rates of delinquency.”
In 2008, Bernanke said that a recession was not coming….
“The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”
A few months before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed, Bernanke insisted that they were totally secure….
“The GSEs are adequately capitalized. They are in no danger of failing.”
For many more examples that demonstrate the absolutely nightmarish track record of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, please see the following articles….
*”Say What? 30 Ben Bernanke Quotes That Are So Stupid That You Won’t Know Whether To Laugh Or Cry”
*”Is Ben Bernanke A Liar, A Lunatic Or Is He Just Completely And Totally Incompetent?”
But after being wrong over and over and over, Barack Obama still nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Chairman of the Fed.
It is hard to put how stupid that was into words.
Look, if someone wrecked your car again and again would you keep handing that person your keys?
It just doesn’t make any sense.
Bernanke made another statement during his visit with the troops this week that was really bizarre….
“The Federal Reserve is not perfect … but at this point, if you look around the world, you see no alternative”
He has got to be kidding, right?
Of course there are no other alternatives for us to look at! Only a handful of nations on earth do not have a central bank at this point. Iran, North Korea and a handful of others don’t have a central bank dominated by the international banking community but basically everyone else does.
Just because nearly every nation on earth has a central bank does not mean that there are not alternatives to the Federal Reserve system. I detailed a plan the other day that would transition us away from the Federal Reserve system.
It most certainly can be done.
But right now, most of our politicians are standing up for a system that allows private central bankers to spend trillions of dollars bailing out their friends while the rest of us suffer.
The other day, an article by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders appeared in the Huffington Post that detailed what was learned during a very limited audit of transactions conducted by the Federal Reserve during the recent financial crisis.
According to Senator Sanders, the Federal Reserve made 16 trillion dollars in secret loans to big corporations, Wall Street banks, foreign nations and wealthy individuals during the financial crisis….
“…we learned that the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16 trillion in total financial assistance to every major financial institution in the country as well as a number of corporations, wealthy individuals and central banks throughout the world.”
Senator Sanders also says that the audit revealed that many of those running the Fed are from the same institutions that the Fed has been bailing out….
“The GAO also revealed that many of the people who serve as directors of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks come from the exact same financial institutions that the Fed is in charge of regulating. Further, the GAO found that at least 18 current and former Fed board members were affiliated with banks and companies that received emergency loans from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.”
Wait – isn’t there a huge conflict of interest problem there?
Of course there is.
But neither major political party is making a stink about it.
Sadly, Senator Sanders says that the audit found that there was “instance after instance” where individuals used their positions at the Fed to benefit their own firms….
“The GAO has detailed instance after instance of top executives of corporations and financial institutions using their influence as Federal Reserve directors to financially benefit their firms, and, in at least one instance, themselves.”
Wow – you would think that this scandal would have been reported on the front page of every major newspaper from coast to coast.
But that didn’t happen.
In fact, both major political parties continue to insist that there is nothing wrong with the Federal Reserve and that the Fed is doing a wonderful job.
It really is sickening.
Look, we need to educate the American people about the Federal Reserve and we need to make control over our currency a major issue in the 2012 campaign.
The American people should demand that the issuing of all United States currency be immediately returned to Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires.
The American people should demand that no more debt-based Federal Reserve Notes be issued and that from now on only debt-free United States money be issued.
The Federal Reserve has a track record of nearly 100 years of failure.
It is time for it to be shut down.
The choice, America, is up to you.
 One of the most important steps that we could take to bring prosperity back to America would be to nationalize the Federal Reserve. Doing so would allow the federal government to quit borrowing money, dramatically reduce taxes and eventually pay off the entire U.S. national debt. Instead of inheriting the largest debt in the history of the world, future generations would actually have a chance at economic prosperity because they would not be forced to pay off the horrific debt of previous generations. The Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine, it has almost completely destroyed the value of the U.S. dollar and it has an absolutely nightmarish track record of incompetence. There are no good reasons to keep the status quo. Our current debt-based monetary system will inevitably lead to a complete and total economic collapse. We desperately need to make a change while we still can. As you will see below, there are a ton of good reasons why we should nationalize the Federal Reserve.
Right now, most Americans believe that the Federal Reserve is actually an agency of the federal government. But that is simply not the case. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as “federal” as Federal Express is.
The Federal Reserve openly admits as much. For example, in defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated in court that it was “not an agency” of the U.S. government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
So who owns the Federal Reserve?
As the Federal Reserve’s own website describes, it is the member banks that own it….
The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations–possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.
The debt-based monetary system established by the Federal Reserve has greatly enriched the big banks and the people that own them. This has been at the expense of the American people.
A private central bank should not issue our currency, set interest rates and run our economy. Rather, we need to return control over the currency to the American people where it belongs.
The following are 14 reasons why we should nationalize the Federal Reserve….
#1 The U.S. Constitution says that the federal government is the one that should be issuing our money.
In particular, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it is the U.S. Congress that has been given the responsibility to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
#2 Our current debt-based monetary system is a perpetual debt machine. It is absolutely imperative that we nationalize the Federal Reserve and begin to issue debt-free money.
In a previous article about money and debt, I explained how more government debt is created whenever the U.S. government puts more money into circulation….
When the government wants more money, the U.S. government swaps U.S. Treasury bonds for “Federal Reserve notes”, thus creating more government debt. Usually the money isn’t even printed up – most of the time it is just electronically credited to the government. The Federal Reserve creates these “Federal Reserve notes” out of thin air. These Federal Reserve notes are backed by nothing and have no intrinsic value of their own.
This process creates a huge problem. When each new dollar is created, the interest owed by the federal government on that new dollar is not also created at the same time.
Therefore, more debt is actually created than the amount of money that the federal government receives from the Federal Reserve.
This is a Ponzi scheme that is designed to drain wealth from the American people and transfer it to the banking system.
This is why I call the Federal Reserve system a perpetual debt machine. Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5,000 times larger than it was 100 years ago.
Back in 1910, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.
By going to a system of debt-free money, the U.S. government would never have to borrow a single dollar ever again.
#3 Our current debt-based monetary system requires very high personal income taxes to pay for it. It is no accident that the personal income tax was introduced at about the same time that the Federal Reserve system came into existence.
If we nationalized the Federal Reserve and capped federal government spending at a reasonable percentage of GDP, it would be entirely possible to massively cut taxes and still keep our promises regarding Social Security and other important social programs at the same time.
I believe that eventually the entire personal income tax system could be completely wiped out and the IRS could be totally shut down. This would save our economy billions upon billions of dollars in income tax compliance costs.
However, as an initial first step, I believe that we should eliminate all payroll taxes, all “self-employment taxes” and all taxes on the first $100,000 earned by every American.
This would provide much needed relief to the millions of poor and middle income families that have been hurt so badly by this economic downturn.
Also, I believe that we could instantly reduce the corporate tax rate to levels that would be competitive with the rest of the world, while closing corporate tax loopholes at the same time. This would remove the temptation for companies to leave the United States in order to escape our brutally high corporate tax rates.
Yes, the proposals above would definitely cut taxes.
So where would we make up the difference?
Well, the U.S. Constitution provides one clue. According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress has the right to impose “duties, imposts and excises” on goods sold in this country.
For way too long, big corporations have been taking advantage of sweatshops in the third world. For way too long, other nations have used predatory trade practices to take unfair advantage of us. For way too long, we have allowed nations with horrific human rights records to ship their goods into our country for free.
Well, we need to bring that to an end. By raising tariffs we would raise money for the federal government and we could potentially start to reverse the flow of jobs and businesses that have been leaving this country.
Access to the U.S. market is a privilege, not a right. High tariffs would be imposed on goods from any country that allows slave labor wages to be paid. Very high tariffs would be imposed on goods from any country that is using predatory trade practices against us. Extremely high tariffs would be imposed on any nation that does not respect basic human rights.
However, please keep in mind that none of this would work if we did not nationalize the Federal Reserve. The tax cuts proposed above would be suicidal under our current debt-based monetary system. But if we nationalize the Fed, we really could do this. It may sound crazy, but it really would work.
#4 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, there would be no more budget deficits. If the federal government was a bit short one year, it would just print up a little bit of extra money in order to make up the difference.
It would also be very important to cap federal government spending as a percentage of GDP so that we don’t have crazy Congress critters creating a lot of inflation by spending us into oblivion.
Just because we would be adopting a debt-free monetary system does not mean that we could throw spending discipline out the window. Rather, it would actually become more important than ever.
#5 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars. That is the amount that is currently on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve just created this money out of thin air anyway, so it was never their money to begin with. Some members of Congress have already proposed cancelling the debt held by the Federal Reserve, and it is a great idea.
#6 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we could eventually get rid of the entire national debt.
Under our current system, the U.S. national debt will never, ever be paid off. We are 15 trillion dollars in debt, and at this point we add more than a trillion dollars to that number every year.
As I have written about previously, if the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
But under our current system we are not paying it off. Rather we keep piling up more debt at an astounding pace.
In a system of debt-free money, there would be no more budget deficits, and we could actually start slowly paying off the national debt with newly issued “United States money”.
This would have to be done very slowly so as to not shock the financial system, but it could be done. As U.S. debt becomes due, a small percentage of it could be retired each year.
It is entirely conceivable that within 30 to 40 years we could pay it off entirely without causing tremendous damage to the financial system.
#7 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we will eventually totally eliminate the interest on the national debt. Most Americans don’t understand this, but each year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars just on interest on the national debt. For example, the U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011.
Under a debt-free monetary system, that number would eventually go to zero. That would save the federal government a ton of money.
#8 While there is certainly a danger that we would have inflation under a debt-free monetary system, the reality is that we are absolutely guaranteed inflation under the Federal Reserve system.
Most Americans believe that inflation is a fact of life, but the sad truth is that the United States has only had a major, ongoing problem with inflation since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.
If you do not believe this, just check out this chart.
Sadly, the U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created.
So, yes, there would be a need for monetary discipline under a debt-free monetary system, but it would be hard to do worse than the Federal Reserve has already been doing.
#9 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we would eliminate all of the financial bubbles that the Federal Reserve has been creating.
For example, there would not have been such a bad housing crash if the Federal Reserve had not created such perfect conditions for a housing bubble in the first place.
We should eliminate the Federal Reserve and allow the market to set interest rates. Having a central authority that sets interest rates is just simply wrong and it creates all sorts of problems.
#10 The Federal Reserve has not been doing a good job.
In case anyone has not noticed, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a very long track record of incompetence. Nearly every major judgment that he has made since taking over that position has been dead wrong.
We are always told that we need someone to run the economy and that the Fed is there to keep depressions from happening.
Well, the truth is that the Fed actually greatly contributed to the Great Depression and it was at least partly responsible for the financial crash of 2008.
Now we are right on the verge of yet another massive financial implosion.
If someone keeps wrecking your car, you don’t let them keep driving it, do you?
#11 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we could potentially transition to “sound money” at some point.
There is great debate about this of course. But it is a debate that we need to have.
But before we go to “hard money” we need to do something about this horrific debt that we have piled up for future generations first. We simply cannot lock this debt in and expect them to pay for our mistakes.
We made this mess, so we need to clean it up.
Going to a debt-free monetary system would allow us to do that.
#12 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, our local banks will have much more freedom. Most Americans simply do not understand just how much power the Federal Reserve actually has over our local banks.
For example, just last year Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.
#13 If we nationalize the Federal Reserve, we won’t have trillions of dollars of secret loans being made to big financial institutions on Wall Street and in foreign countries.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their friends during the last financial crisis.
Meanwhile, hundreds of small banks were left out in the cold and the American people got no help.
This is rampant corruption and it needs to be stopped.
#14 The Federal Reserve needs to be nationalized because it is an unelected, unaccountable “fourth branch of government” that has gotten completely and totally out of control. Even some members of Congress are now openly complaining about how much power the Fed has. For example, Ron Paul told MSNBC last year that he believes that the Federal Reserve is now more powerful than Congress…..
“The regulations should be on the Federal Reserve. We should have transparency of the Federal Reserve. They can create trillions of dollars to bail out their friends, and we don’t even have any transparency of this. They’re more powerful than the Congress.”
To learn much more about the Federal Reserve and how it is destroying prosperity in America, there is a great animated documentary on YouTube entitled “The American Dream” that you can watch right here.
It is absolutely imperative that the American people get educated about the Federal Reserve and about why a debt-based monetary system is bad for us.
In 1922, Henry Ford wrote the following….
“The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few.”
The U.S. government does not need to go into debt to anyone.
The U.S. government is a sovereign nation.
So why in the world are we 15 trillion dollars in debt?
We have allowed ourselves to become willingly enslaved.
In the book of Proverbs, it tells us the following….
The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
By allowing ourselves to become enslaved to debt, we have become the servants of the international banking system.
Our founding fathers attempted to warn us about this.
For example, Thomas Jefferson strongly believed that when the federal government borrows money in one generation which must be paid back by future generations it is equivalent to stealing….
And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Not only that, Thomas Jefferson also once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing….
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
If we had implemented that advice, how much better off would we be today?
We can still do this.
We can take back control of our financial system.
We can nationalize the Federal Reserve.
We can dramatically cut taxes and eventually shut down the IRS.
We can give our children and grandchildren a future that is debt free.
We can escape the tyranny of the international bankers.
The choice, America, is up to you.
 The Federal Reserve wants to know what you are saying about it. In fact, the Federal Reserve has announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. This is yet another sign that the alternative media is having a dramatic impact. As first reported on Zero Hedge, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has issued a “Request for Proposal” to suppliers who may be interested in participating in the development of a “Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution”. In other words, the Federal Reserve wants to develop a highly sophisticated system that will gather everything that you and I say about the Federal Reserve on the Internet and that will analyze what our feelings about the Fed are. Obviously, any “positive” feelings about the Fed would not be a problem. What they really want to do is to gather information on everyone that views the Federal Reserve negatively. It is unclear how they plan to use this information once they have it, but considering how many alternative media sources have been shut down lately, this is obviously a very troubling sign.
You can read this “Request for Proposal” right here. Posted below are some of the key quotes from the document (in bold) with some of my own commentary in between the quotes….
“The intent is to establish a fair and equitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and news sources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY. This Request for Proposal (“RFP”) was created in an effort to support FRBNY’s Social Media Listening Platforms initiative.”
A system like this is not cheap. Apparently the Federal Reserve Bank of New York believes that gathering all of this information is very important. In recent years, criticism of the Federal Reserve has become very intense, and most of this criticism has been coming from the Internet. It has gotten to the point where the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has decided that it had better listen to what is being said and find out who is saying it.
“Social media listening platforms are solutions that gather data from various social media outlets and news sources. They monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria. They can also determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intends to listen in on “billions of conversations” and to actually determine the “sentiment” of those that are participating in those conversations.
Of course it will be those conversations that are “negative” about the Federal Reserve that will be setting off the alarm bells.
“Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers”
Uh oh. So they plan to “identify” key bloggers and influencers?
What exactly do they plan to do once they “identify” them?
“The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube.”
Hopefully you understand this already, but nothing posted on the Internet is ever anonymous. Everything on the Internet is gathered by a vast host of organizations and is used for a wide variety of purposes. Data mining has become a billion dollar industry, and it is only going to keep growing.
You may think that you are “anonymous” when you criticize organizations like the Fed, but the truth is that if you are loud enough they will see it and they will make a record of it.
“The solution must provide real-time monitoring of relevant conversations. It should provide sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) around key conversational topics.”
Why do they need to perform “sentiment analysis”?
If someone is identified as being overly “negative” about the Fed, what will they do about it?
“The solution should provide an alerting mechanism that automatically sends out reports or notifications based a predefined trigger.”
This sounds very much like the kind of “keyword” intelligence gathering systems that are currently in use by major governments around the globe.
Very, very creepy stuff.
Are you disturbed yet?
For those of us that write about the Federal Reserve a lot, this is very sobering news.
I wonder what the Fed will think about the following articles that I have posted on this site….
*Unelected, Unaccountable, Unrepentant: The Federal Reserve Is Using Your Money To Bail Out European Commercial Banks Once Again
*Celebrating Independence Yet Enslaved To Debt
*19 Reasons Why The Federal Reserve Is At The Heart Of Our Economic Problems
*Is Ben Bernanke A Liar, A Lunatic Or Is He Just Completely And Totally Incompetent?
*10 Things That Would Be Different If The Federal Reserve Had Never Been Created
What is their “Social Media Monitoring Solution” going to think about those articles?
Unfortunately, this is all part of a very disturbing trend.
Recently, a very creepy website known as “Attack Watch” was launched to gather information on those saying “negative” things about Barack Obama.
Suddenly, everyone seems obsessed with what you and I are saying.
This just shows how the power of the alternative media is growing.
Not only that, but it seems as though the government also wants to gather as much information on all of us as possible.
For example, a new rule is being proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would force health insurance companies to submit detailed health care information about all of their customers to the federal government.
Every single day our privacy is being stripped away a little bit more.
But now it is often not just enough for them to know what we are doing and saying. Instead, the “authorities” are increasingly stepping in to silence important voices.
One of the most recent examples of this was when Activistpost was taken down by Google. We are still awaiting word on why this was done.
Sadly, the silencing of Activistpost is far from an isolated incident.
Hordes of YouTube accounts have been shut down for their political viewpoints.
Quite a few very prominent alternative media websites have been censored or attacked because of what they stand for.
So why is this happening? Well, it turns out that the power of the alternative media is growing. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, 43 percent of Americans say that they get their news on national and international issues from the Internet. Back in 1999, that figure was sitting at just 6 percent.
The American people are sick and tired of getting “canned news”, and they are increasingly turning to the Internet in a search for the truth.
As I have written about previously, the mainstream media in this country is overwhelmingly dominated by just 6 very powerful corporations….
Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don’t even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. Most Americans don’t really seem to care about who owns the media. But they should. The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month. In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something. Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.
The “news” that we get from various mainstream sources seems to always be so similar. It is as if nearly all mainstream news organizations are reading from the same script. The American people know that they are not getting the whole truth and they have been increasingly looking to alternative sources.
The monopoly over the news that the mainstream media once possessed has been broken. The alternative media is now creating some huge problems for organizations that were once very closely protected by the mainstream media.
The American people are starting to wake up and they are starting to get very upset about a lot of the corruption that has been going on in our society.
But it turns out that the “authorities” don’t like it too much when Americans try to actually exercise free speech in America today. For example, you can see recent video of female protesters in New York City being penned in by police and then brutally maced right here.
Are you sickened by that?
You should be.
What the “authorities” want is for us to shut up, sit in our homes and act as if nothing wrong is happening.
Meanwhile, they seem determined to watch us more closely than ever.
So are you going to be afraid to talk negatively about the Federal Reserve now that you know that they are going to be watching what you say on the Internet?
Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….
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