Free Republic

Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz might end up running against each other for the Republican presidential nomination, but they can agree on one thing: their distrust of the Federal Reserve. On Wednesday, the two Republican senators introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act which Mr. Paul has been pushing for some time.Republicans have questioned the Fed’s moves to stimulate the economy since the financial crisis, arguing that the expansion of its balance sheet will create economic instability. In 2011, Gov. Rick Perry called the Fed’s monetary policies potentially “treasonous” and said that Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman at the...

European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi announced the launch of an open-ended, expanded monthly 60 billion euro ($70 billion) private and public bond-buying program on Thursday. The long-anticipated introduction of euro zone government bond purchases will bring the ECB's buying program into line with the U.S. Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE). The program will be open-ended, lasting until at least 2016, Draghi told reporters at his regular media conference on Thursday, and will start in March this year. The hope is that it will boost the region's painfully low inflation rate, which came in at an annual minus 0.2...

Nick at Sharelynx Gold, also known as Gold Charts "R" Us emailed an interesting chart last week showing gold drain at the New York Fed. Earmarked gold dropped 42 tonnes for the month of October as foreign countries repatriate their gold home. Here's a link to Earmarked Gold with a second chart that shows all Fed holdings. Gold Charts "R" Us has 1,000's of pages and over 10,000 charts on a subscription basis, but you can check out the site for free until December 14. Click on the first link at the top for a look. Where's the Gold Going?...

Stock prices were slumping in early December, for good reasons, including global economic weakness. But they have surged ever since the Fed stated its intention not to raise rates in the near term. The challenge for the Fed is to hold rates low without inflating bubbles. The way to do so is to control speculation through stepped-up regulation of banks and other financial institutions. Instead, the Fed has been inclined to ease up on regulation. On Dec. 19, it delayed a core provision of the Volcker Rule, a part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bans speculative trading...

The most powerful woman in the world, without an army, just propelled the Dow Jones to a two-day 700-point spike by saying “patience.”  Janet Yellen said the Federal Reserve, the quasi-agency that neither is “federal” nor has any “reserves," can be “patient” in their rate hikes in 2015. She was quick, and clumsy by other accounts, to confuse the rate hike issue, with language suggesting that it might not happen at all.  In the vein of the famous watering hole sign, “free beer tomorrow,” Yellen essentially gave the message that rates would go up in 2015, but they might...

...its lowest levels against the dollar for almost a year, amid investor nervousness about emerging markets. By evening trade in Istanbul the currency had fallen beyond TL2.30 to the US dollar, more than 1 per cent down on the day and the weakest level since January, when the Turkish central bank moved to increase interest rates -- a dramatic shift in policy that at the time halted a precipitous drop in its value. ...Turkey is far from alone in being affected by strong US economic data that has heightened expectations of a US Federal Reserve interest rate rise and so...

As the Dutch central bank looks to repatriate some of its gold reserves back from the New York Federal Reserve, Dennis Gartman, the editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter, has questioned what reputational damage this could cause for the U.S. The Dutch central bank last week confirmed that it was shipping gold from the U.S. to the Netherlands to "spread its gold stock in a more balanced way", adding that it would have a "positive effect on public confidence". It comes after the Germans made a similar move in 2013, indicating that it would transfer 300 tons from New...

From the dawn of history, elites have always attempted to enslave humanity.  Yes, there have certainly been times when those in power have slaughtered vast numbers of people, but normally those in power find it much more beneficial to profit from the labor of those that they are able to subjugate.  If you are forced to build a pyramid, or pay a third of your crops in tribute, or hand over nearly half of your paycheck in taxes, that enriches those in power at your expense.  You become a “human resource” that is being exploited to serve the interests of...

Tyler Durden11/29/2014 A week ago, when we reported that in a stunning move, the "Dutch Central Bank Secretly Withdrew 122 Tons Of Gold From The New York Fed", and when looking at the NY Fed's monthly reports of gold deposits by foreign entities, we observed that "we can see that while the 5 tons outflow in 2013 was most likely Germany, the recent surge in gold repatriation from Liberty 33 was the Netherlands. That said, only 77.5 tons of NY deposits gold has been officially repatriated through September, which means the October update, when it comes out, will be a...

If there ever was a doubt that Dodd-Frank had unintended consequences the announcement that Ben Bernanke was unable to refinance his home clenched that argument for good. We know Mr. Bernanke recently lost his job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, but we can rest assured he is capable of getting another high paying position. If Bernanke has a problem refinancing than what will face Joan Miller is Elmira, New York?We recently discussed the state of the market with Richard Koevary. Koevary is President of Blue Sky Mortgage, Inc. in Arizona where he has been a licensed mortgage broker for...

"[If] the monetary authorities are intent on depreciating the currency, then I think that in the fullness of time they will succeed all too well. …The important thing about QE [quantitative easing] is this idea, this radical precedent is now on the books — the virus as it were is in the monetary bloodstream. ...all of this is…in the books as precedent, and the monetarists and Keynesians are rather preening about the evident success of these interventions, and we can be sure I think that they will not forebear to do more still next time. There will come a time...

If I were advising the White House right now, I would encourage President Obama to take advantage of the end of this year's election cycle—the next fifty or so days—to immediately try to change the subject, in a big way. The Obama administration should act right away to use its executive powers to take steps to deal with long-ignored issues that need to be dealt with for the good of the nation. This cannot be done quietly. To change the media narrative, issues acted upon will have to be controversial enough to dominate the news. President Obama should embrace good...

The week was dominated by news by central banks as the Federal Reserve ended QE and the Bank of Japan pushed its QE program to new heights. The result was another rally in stocks around the globe that made the mini-correction earlier this month seem like a dream (or a nightmare). The question is what happens next, and all indications are that markets will continue to ride the wave of central bank liquidity as far as it takes them. Markets were also boosted by a strong initial third quarter U.S. GDP report showing the economy grew at 3.5% and strong...

Federal Reserve is losing control. They cannot keep interest rates low forever. Nobody can. And when rates rise, the results will be devastating In the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) utters, “the horror, the horror,” on his deathbed. He might as well have been talking about the U.S. dollar. Central banks maintain a nation’s currency. As the world’s largest central bank, the United States Federal Reserve, or “Fed,” sets the rate of interest in worldwide lending. It also has major influence on monetary policy. For instance, the Fed’s $85 billion per month in...

It’s long past time to end the Fed as it is currently constructed. And it was only a matter of time before an Obama appointee put an exclamation on the point. It’s what Obama appointees are best at. Yellen stepped out of her role as Master of the Stock Market to expound on taxation and public education.Yellen points out that poor school districts sometimes aren’t funded as well as rich one are because the United States relies on local control of education. It’s what she calls “subnational taxation.” Her implied proposal is that it would be much better if the...

Prior to 1913, there was no federal income tax. The states had rights and representation in Washington, D.C., there was no Federal Reserve Bank, and the federal government lived under the enumerated powers afforded within the U.S. Constitution. What a difference one year can make... ... Passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution would forever change life in America, and not for the better. ... Further, thanks to the 17th Amendment, also passed in 1913, the states no longer have representation in Washington, D.C. Once again, what seemed like a simple sentence and a good idea to some at...

The IRS failed to take all required steps for collecting unpaid taxes from people it can’t locate in over half the cases that investigators studied, potentially costing the government a pile of lost revenue, according to a federal report released Monday. The study does not estimate exactly how much money the IRS might collect if its workers were conducting all the research they are supposed to perform to find the taxpayers. The investigators wrote that in 2012, the IRS declared $6.7 billion in unpaid taxes to be uncollectable—involving nearly 483,000 tax returns—because it couldn’t find the taxpayers. Of that total,...

For years, many people have suspected that the New York Fed is more or less controlled by the "too big to fail" banks. Well, now we have smoking gun evidence that this is indeed the case. A very brave lawyer named Carmen Segarra made a series of audio recordings while she was working for the New York Fed. The 46 hours of meetings and conversations that she recorded are being called "the Ray Rice video for the financial sector" because of the explosive content that they contain. What these recordings reveal are regulators that are deeply afraid to do anything...

Despite struggling with the ongoing border crisis, Texas is the number three state in terms of job growth, creating more than 20,000 jobs in August alone, with an unemployment rate of just 5.3%. So, what is Texas doing right? […] (President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard) Fisher explained that Texas is way ahead of much of the nation economically largely due to its highly diversified economy, pro-business government and lack of income tax. …

For folks who are trying to ignite inflation, this sure isn’t working out very well. It’s been hoped by the country’s central bankers that the massive quantitative easing program along with near-zero interest rates will touch off a wave of inflation that if not exactly the same thing as boom times, will at least give the appearance of a strengthening economy. However, month after month inflation in the goods that the Fed cares about seems muted. Now this month we had the horrid news that official inflation numbers are falling not rising.