Posted on 02/11/2014 5:14:13 AM PST by Michigan Bowhunter
If you had the opportunity to ask the chair of the Federal Reserve a question later today with regard to financial services in the USA, what would you ask?
Request current Federal Reserve Bank financial status. Balance sheet, income statment and executive compensation disclosure.
What and when are you going to liquidate your US Bonds you purchased to pump up the government?
quarterly.
Would you prefer the .30-06 or the Guillotine?
(followup question)Blindfolded or not?
(followup question)Cigarette?
Is there any gold in Ft. Knox.
I’d ask her to explain the Federal Reserve’s belief in what they call “full employment”. From 2004-2006, the Fed raised interest rates over 400% in 2 years—(from 1% to 5.25%) for the publically states goal, according to Bernanke of SLOWING DOWN THE ECONOMY through the housing sector to slow job growth & prevent wages from rising at something the Fed calls “full employment”.
I believe the concept of “full employment” is a bogus as the concept of “global warming”—which is about adding up temperature readings from all over the world & averaging them out, then concocting a theory to explain a “net” warming—which is NOT uniform all over the globe.
Same is true about so-called “full employment”. You might have a 10% unemployment rate in Detroit & a 2.5% unemployment rate in Phoenix (like was true around 2007) & the Fed just averages them together—as if labor isn’t mobile and as if illegals were not pouring across the border & people taking second jobs or coming off welfare to provide surplus labor when the unemployment rate gets low.
The concept of “full employment” I think is academic voodoo based on “Phillips Curve” professor Phillips-—who made the rather mundane operation that supply & demand/buyers & sellers effect PRICE of things. He said that when the unemployment rate falls below a certain level, then WAGES tend to rise. That level is what the Fed now calls “full employment” & tries to micro-manage the economy around this number, believing that if wages rise when the unemployment rate is low, that will cause prices to rise...and they call this “inflation”. Personally, I think wages rising when the economy is good leads to budget surpluses, which strengthens the dollar & keeps many prices FROM rising..and allows tax cuts & spending cuts which tampers down inflationary pressures.
Professor Phillips said that WAGES tend to rise when the unemployment rate gets low, he never said that the unemployment rate falls because of inflation. It simply has become a voodoo belief by the Fed that you don’t want a low unemployment rate because then wages will rise, driving up prices, too.
This is the orgin of the Fed “dual mandate” of 1977, which Paul Volcker called “taking away the punch bowl just as the guests are arriving at the party”. In effect, the Fed causes inflation and lets prices rise when the economy is bad & people can least afford it, but them refuses to let wages rise when the economy is good & there’s lots of surplus labor and mobile labor all over the country & the world.
Excess labor from immigration, and Fed boom-bust causing theory is why wages aren’t keeping up with prices for the bottom 99%....but liberals blame capitalism & tax cuts.
The have successfully blamed Republicans for what happened in 2008...when the Fed eased before prices fell or jobless rate plunged, thereby driving up the price of gas to kill consumer confidence & demand and drive capital out of the country. The Fed & government caused this recession, not capitalism.
But I think the answer isn’t Austrian school “don’t let good economies happen” in the first place policy. The Fed overcorrects either way, because they make big changes over short time periods and don’t wait long enough, even if they believe they act in careful increments.
That’s a really great question.
I’d also like to know what she would do if Congress revoked the Fed Charter. I believe an earlier ‘version’ of The Federal Reserve(2nd Bank of The United States) conspired to harm the country in order to ruin Andrew Jackson while he was making an effort to break their bank.
That would be a question for the Mint. They run the gold depository, not the Fed.
Who owns the Federal Reserve?
why did Bernanke claim that home prices never fell, make rosy prediction of 3% growth/2% inflation for 2007, 2.8% growth/1.8% inflation for 2008, then 2.6% growth with 1.6% inflation for 2009 and get it completely wrong????
why did the Fed care about asset prices and not consumer prices after 2008?
why did the Fed allow gas price to rise from $1.85 back to $4 a gallon after 2009, when falling gas prices caused the recession to end 6 months earlier than even Democrat economists predicted when they said that the recession would end by the end of 2009 and unemployment rate would top-out at 8.8%?
why didn’t the Fed see a Ponzi scheme in the connection between the bond market & housing market booms—where the money that drove the housing boom in the end was driven by excessive optimism & speculation & greed-—when in fact, as soon as home prices fell, the bonds that financed the housing boom became toxic and buying homes became toxic to. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs had loaded up on credit default swaps to pay the yield on the mortgage backed bonds (or was it bond-backed mortgages?) when the markets crashed for bonds and housing?
did the Fed really think it could fix Humpty Dumpty by printing money? Where in the Fed “dual mandate” does it say the Fed should abandon the demand side of the economy & focus on the supply side by using easy money to drive up asset prices to create come elusive “wealth effect”?
in the 1990s under Clinton—was it really a “wealth effect”, anyway? or was it JUSTIFIED optimism —ie a balanced budget and no deficits to crowd out private investment combined with low interest rates & cheap gas prices when gas price fell to 90 cents in 1998—down from $1.11 in 1981!????
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