Posted on 06/27/2012 6:30:15 PM PDT by TurboZamboni
The House oversight committee voted Wednesday to demand a broad audit of the Federal Reserve system by congressional investigators - a major move lawmakers said is designed to bring accountability to the murky workings of the independent board.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who turned the push for an audit into a powerful campaign slogan and whose criticism of the Fed’s monetary policy drew hundreds of thousands of voters into the political process.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Now we’re talking!
If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way
I would tear this old building down
— Rev Gary Davis
GO GO GO go go gooooooooo! Do it! Pass that bill!
Well, well, RP is acting on his ideas....Audit the Fed.
As much as I’d like to see it done, as see where the money goes...don’t think it has any chance of posting.
Audit’s of the Fed are already on the Web.
Then what the hell is this?
The gold in Ft Knox is gone.
A charade. A naive piece of nothingness.
They can audit the Fed all they want. There is “no controlling authority” that can make the Fed do something the audit committee or the auditing entity finds objectionable. It’s like so many other things in our society at this juncture: We have laws on the books, they just are not being enforced. The purpose of the laws on the books is not to find some errant behavior; it is to justify bloviating by members of Congress who need to justify their existence by clamoring for new law when existing laws are perfectly adequate to regulate the errant behavior-—if they were enforced. They are not being enforced. Thus, the laws are explained as being inadequate and it’s obviously Geo Bush’s fault that they weren’t regulated enough and we need more regulation. What do we get? We get Dodd-Frank, a meaningless pile of crap that did effectively nothing except double consumer credit card rates. Because it was written by the banks. The entire exercise is absolutely meaningless, unless of course you are a banker, in which case the circles of illegality that are ignored by the Feds and any regulatory structures that may be in place are incrementally expanded. Because there is no will, nor no authority to enforce the law as written or as it will be written when the primary contributors to political activity are themselves the very people the regulations would seek to regulate. In short, Congress is owned by bankers.
For example, we are used to seeing (on Fridays) some number of bank shutdowns by the FDIC. The FDIC is charged with “prompt corrective action” which means and is clearly defined as taking action when a bank’s statuatory capital falls below certain thresholds. When this happens, the failure of bank loans (or embezzlements by bank officers) threaten FDIC (insurance) funds. There is NEVER supposed to be any sizable use of those funds. The Feds are supposed to step in and seize the bank. But we see banks being seized with 10, 20, 30, 40+% shortfalls in their asset bases as booked under so-called audited financial statements. In other words, we see massive fraud on an industry-wide basis. This means that the Feds were sleeping, or were looking elsewhere, or were on the take when the bank failed. Taxpayers had to pick up the shortage. “Prompt corrective action” was not taken. Ahhh, but see, there is no “or else” in the banking regs. There is no “Sheila Bair, now you get to do ten years because you DIDN’T take PCA”. There is no “or else”.
So if you are seeing no punitive action being brought to the FDIC which is squandering taxpayer funds by failing in its mission to ensure solvency and adequacy of reserves on the part of banks, why in the blazing fires of holy hell does anyone think that such regulation would be in any way applied to the Fed? The very presumption is completely absurd. There is no law governing the Fed. There are “mandates”, there are “mission statements” there are “guidelines”. There is nobody who can tell the Fed to do. It does what it wants to do. As a hybrid private corporation owned for the most part by the money center banks, who own Congress, there is nothing to hope for here. It’s an exercise in pure futility, and it was designed that way when the Fed came into existence 99 years ago.
Yeah, I could audit Ft. Knox in about the ten minutes it would take me to walk around the empty vault.
Bank of England has no gold either.
A bill to audit the Fed has 0% chance in the Senate. That’s reality.
The 1980s S&L debacle is a perfect illustration of what you are saying.
Reagan asked congress for $16 Billion early on to clean up the S&L mess. Congress didn't do it. A few years down the road $400 billion was the price tag.
It's not real money to the people in DC.
Grandstanding for the uninformed. Political deception.
These Links are old, but the same site probably has more recent audits at this point.
2009 Combined Federal Reserve banks - Independent Auditor Report on Page 3
2009 Federal Reserve Board financial statements - Independent Auditor Statement Page 2
Financial Statements of the Federal Reserve Banks (Combined and Individual banks)
Annual Report - Federal Reserve Board 2010 Budget Review.
There is one component of the board that is not subject to congressional audit. And it was congress who made it that way. That’s the policy decisions. Of course interest rate policy is announced as soon as the Board of Governors meet. Which pretty much just leaves the Open Market Committee meetings.
They’re the ones that stabilize exchange rates, and shore up the system when a part becomes shaky. You don’t want those decisions public while the FED is actually trying to implement the plan, because people like Soros will work against them. But the money is all accounted for.
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