Posted on 10/22/2015 6:17:34 PM PDT by george76
Two new books are reigniting a century-old debate about the central bank’s worthiness.
So what do we think of the Federal Reserve, the people who run it, and the role it plays in setting short-term rates and even influencing investment portfolios?
While the modern Fed has its supporters, the detractors seem to get most of the ink.
As veteran financial journalist Roger Lowenstein wrote in a recent column for The Wall Street Journal, “No federal agency, except the Internal Revenue Service, is held in lower regard than the Federal Reserve, according to public opinion surveys.
...
The never-ending debate about the worthiness of the Federal Reserve and the economists who run it has received some fresh oxygen in the form of two news books: Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve and former Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s A Courage to Act, his memoir about the financial crisis.
Both books have triggered a fresh round of discussion about the modern Fed, and I’ve chosen to call out some of the more interesting reactions.
(Excerpt) Read more at barrons.com ...
~ Senator Nelson Aldrich
Fed: monetary policy.
Congress: fiscal policy.
Americans inability to control federal spending (fiscal policy) leads them to blame Fed policy (monetary policy).
I’m a fan of Austrian economics, but once you enter Keynesian economics, the Austrians have a responsibility to show the way out. They have not done that.
One of the first rules of power is that authority flows to those who accept responsibility. There is no one on the GOP side willing to take responsibility for the entire country’s economic mess. And that scares a lot of people- on the left.
Grow some balls, accept responsibility for those who have been hit hard by “free” trade, explain how it will work going forward (ie— why is unemployment insurance still a- public sector, and b- run at the state level?... privatize it, dammit! Make it nationwide thru private insurers).
GOP is a collection of pantywaists.
The Federal Reserve is the foundation of the progressive-left big-government nanny state. Without fiat money, unlimited debt, manipulated interest rates and manufactured inflation - there is absolutely no way the US Federal Government could go $19 trillion in debt, supporting everything from welfare and destruction of the black family to obamacare and Planned Parenthood.
In the meantime, their member banks are given priority treatment and even bailed out when they act stupidly
The Federal Reserve and the socialized, politicized monetary system it controls will eventually destroy the United States.
NO. Its a miracle there are even any fiscal conservatives left at all, when the Federal Reserve enables massive Government over-spending through debt-monetization, inflation and fake interest rates. Certainly, The Fed have turned Wall Street into a casino, and the American public (people who elect congressmen) believing Government will always give them a free lunch, paid for by someone else.
The Fed does not do anything without executive and legislative branch approval. Period. Until you can accept what we have done to ourselves, you ain’t going to make it.
any article which relies on PATENTLY PHONEY (government) ‘statistics’ (lies) like... the supposed ‘5% unemployment rate’......(snicker snicker).... is a waste of time reading.
This scheme to allow government to print money and issue debt has the effect of being the grandest embezzlement of private wealth in all human history. Because government now issues debt to pay the interest on debt as it matures, it also has the effect of imposing debt serfdom not only on all citizens but on all their yet unaborted children.
Notice what Alan Greenspan said about the very Federal Reserve that he used to head:
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
From the last two paragraphs of Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan. 1966.
see: http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm
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