Posted on 10/18/2015 4:08:05 AM PDT by expat_panama
Antipathy to the central bank is a uniquely American tradition. No federal agency, except the Internal Revenue Service, is held in lower regard than the Federal Reserve, according to public opinion surveys. The left accuses the Fed of being too cozy with banks; the right says it is planting the seeds of a massive inflation.
[snip]
...President James Madison, previously an opponent, argued that a bank could be useful...
[snip]
...the Second Bank strengthened America’s currency and finances, Andrew Jackson reviled it as a tool of privilege. He vowed to “kill” it, and did. Tocqueville concluded that Americans “are obviously preoccupied by one great fear,” the fear of “centralization.”...
[snip]
...antipathy to the federal government stemmed from our experience as colonial subjects of a distant king...
[snip]
...Jefferson idealized farmers and scorned financiers. Bankers, by contrast, were slick and beguiling. This attitude persisted into the 20th century. After the stock-market panic of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt objected to the revulsion against bankers...
[snip]
When Woodrow Wilson ran for president in 1912, he was forced to declare himself “opposed to the idea of a central bank”...
[snip]
Today, these groups have switched sides. Wall Street has largely supported Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s low-interest-rate policy while populist critics have castigated the Fed for promoting inflation. Still, inflation remains low...
[snip]
But if the Federal Reserve didn’t exist, Congress would have a hard time enacting it now...
[snip]
...Some object to ultralow interest rates, fearing that they will lead to economic distortions, while others resent the bailouts and other programs designed to ease the 2008 financial crisis.
Acting as this sort of “lender of last resort” was the Fed’s original purpose, of course, but many Americans still think that the Fed has too much power. Jackson’s ghost lives on.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
OK.... thanks
it is the monitoring and regulating part that produce the extra lines I guess.
—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEZH0t5Yozw
http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/origins.html
Functions of Money
Specific functions (mostly micro-economic)
Unit of account (abstract)
Common measure of value (abstract)
Medium of exchange (concrete)
Means of payment (concrete)
Standard for deferred payments (abstract)
Store of value (concrete)
General functions (mostly macro-economic and abstract)
Liquid asset
Framework of the market allocative system (prices)
A causative factor in the economy
Controller of the economy
The table above comes from page 27 of A History of Money.
Not everything used as money as all the functions listed above. Furthermore the functions of any particular form of money may change over time. As Glyn Davies points out on page 28:
“What is now the prime or main function in a particular community or country may not have been the first or original function in time, while what may well have been a secondary or derived function in one place may have been in some other region the original which gave rise to a related secondary function... The logical listing of functions in the table therefore implies no priority in either time or importance, for those which may be both first and foremost reflect only their particular time and place.”
He goes on to conclude from this that the best definition is as follows:
Money is anything that is widely used for making payments and accounting for debts and credits.
I think if you dragged one of the fed board members onto a patio and asked them to define their job...he’d still be chatting on paragraph one about thirty minutes into the conversation.
If you split people up into their professions....there are some people who can sum up their work in two or three lines (ditch diggers, airline pilots, septic tank guys, etc). There are some folks who require sixteen lines (ferryboat pilots, zoo keepers, and ministers).
Then you come to the ten-page crowd (economists, farmers, and politicians). To be honest, I do give credit to farmers...they do ten times the work of an average guy...rarely write notes....probably have the knowledge level of a rocket-scientist, and make life-and-death decisions over animals who have a name.
Let's think about that. Right now our constitution says that the value of money has to be at the whim of Congress. Does your view involve chucking/changing the constitution or are you saying that Congress should just whim over to bitcoin or gold for a while?
What, you took some kind of poll or you just made that up?
The Federal Reserve is a product of the Great Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century. Starting with that “great” Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, we were gifted with Income tax, direct election of Senators, Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage and The Federal Reserve.
How’s all that working out for Ya?
Some better than others.
Stopped reading right there.
Here's Who Actually Owns The Federal Reserve
But the Fed is a weird entity when it comes to “ownership”. It exists due to an act of Congress. But it is also considered an independent entity because it is not part of the Executive or Legislative branches of government. The Fed exists because Congress created it, but it doesn’t enact policy measures with any Congressional or Presidential approval. Politically, this makes it a very independent entity.
Here is a bit from the piece to give you the author’s sympathies
Maybe this prompted the Fed’s creation. Imagine how humiliating to progressives that the banks had to turn to a capitalist pig (J. P. Morgan) to bail them out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907
The panic might have deepened if not for the intervention of financier J. P. Morgan,[3] who pledged large sums of his own money, and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the banking system. At the time, the United States did not have a central bank to inject liquidity back into the market. By November, the financial contagion had largely ended, only to be replaced by a further crisis. This was due to the heavy borrowing of a large brokerage firm that used the stock of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TC&I) as collateral. Collapse of TC&I’s stock price was averted by an emergency takeover by Morgan’s U.S. Steel Corporation—a move approved by anti-monopolist president Theodore Roosevelt. The following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.[4][5]
He left out the fact that the open market resolved the issues of the FEDRES via bank clearing houses, but that history would prove we don’t need a FEDRES. They don’t work for the country, but creditors and themselves.
Wyatt’s Torch had that great quote from the Fed where they weren’t even watching critical stats on the economy.
Bank clearing houses on the open market. We now have the information to let consumers manage the banking system.
Yeah that's gonna work.
It’s that kind of cogent analysis that keeps conservatives in top form.
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