Free Republic

For a Republican, Ted Cruz has a unique criticism of the Federal Reserve. The conservative Texas senator and contender for the GOP presidential nomination argues that the central bank is responsible for causing the financial crisis and recession because it kept money too tight in 2008. Cruz's criticism of the Fed is nearly the opposite of the one typically voiced by Republicans, who generally fault Chairwoman Janet Yellen and her predecessor Ben Bernanke for their efforts to ease money. GOP complaints about the Fed have grown since the central bank lowered interest rates to zero and started quantitative easing programs....

The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that “most Americans are not feeling the difference” from the Fed’s “experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.” It reports that “a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits...

Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has passionately called for dismantling the Federal Reserve, will be running the panel that oversees the central bank when Republicans take the House majority next year. Mr. Paul has introduced legislation to abolish the Fed, wrote the book, “End the Fed,” and rallied support for eliminating it. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), who will take over the House Financial Services Committee from Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), announced today that Mr. Paul, a libertarian who won a fervent following when he ran for president in 2008, will head the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee....

WASHINGTON, June 26 - Federal Reserve officials, who meet this week, are beginning to suspect that the perplexing decline in long-term interest rates is more than a temporary aberration. The possibility has major implications for the economy, and it creates new puzzles for Fed officials on how they should respond. On Thursday, the Fed is all but certain to raise the federal funds rate on overnight loans between banks by another quarter point, to 3.25 percent. That would be the ninth increase in the last year, and the central bank is expected to signal that it will continue to raise...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A decision by Federal Reserve Governor Edward Gramlich to step down from his post in August underscores the rare degree to which President Bush will have a hand in molding the U.S. central bank. Bush has already named five of the seven members of the Fed's Washington-based board, although one of them, Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, was initially chosen by President Bill Clinton. Only two members do not owe their seat to Bush: Gramlich, who said on Wednesday he will step down Aug. 31, well ahead of the expiration of his term in 2008, and Chairman Alan...

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com A former IRS criminal-investigation special agent who left the agency and became a whistleblower exposing government fraud and abuse says the agency, in its attempt to prevent him from serving as an official representative of taxpayers, is illegally using "enforcers" to monitor his political activities and build its case against him. On his website, Freedom Above Fortune, former IRS employee Joe Banister explains his journey from special agent to a member of the "tax honesty movement" – activists working to expose what they consider is a fraudulent income-tax system. He says when he quit his job at...