Refresher: The Federal Reserve Bank is not a government agency. It is the world’s largest private bank. Government has given it special privileges to basically:
- counterfeit money (i.e., create it from thin air);
- fix key prices in the economy (interest rates);
- tax Americans indirectly (by creating inflation/money and financing government with the proceeds);
- goose the financial markets for the proverbial “one percent” – which includes government officials themselves;
- bail out irresponsible/incompetent banks – and (via measures of “regulation”) prevent up-and-coming banks from challenging them;
- generally plan the markets (create bubbles, followed of course by crises);
- plan the number of crappy, part-time jobs that Obama’s economy can create for the little people;
- and escape the Freedom of Information Act.
So, from The Hill’s coverage of Janet Yellen’s testimony to Congress on Wednesday:
The biggest challenge to the Fed’s structure is the growing movement to Audit the Fed via legislation from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)…
A GOP-controlled Congress has given the bill its best chances yet of passage, and that renewed interest led Yellen to deliver her most spirited opposition yet.
“I want to be completely clear,” she said. “I strongly oppose Audit the Fed.”
Surprise, surprise.
Hat tip, ZH.
Also Liz “Fauxcahontas” Warren… who claims to be on the side of the people against the big banks… also opposes Audit the Fed.
If the FED were making sausage suspected of containing Panda meat and gluten, this would be a different thing entirely.
LOL 🙂
No, they would have to use LGBTQLABCDEFG Pandas before an audit could happen. I think it’s a new FCC regulation.
They better audit it soon before the FEDS inability to print borrowers becomes too big a problem. I hope everyone wanting the FED audit is prepared for the collapse like when Soros killed the British pound as world reserve currency, because we wont be like Iceland in not letting “you know who” socialize their losses.
Jeff – the link to the article about the repeal of the insider trading disclosure was entertaining in a sad way.
My dad once remarked that we (the citizenry) lost when politics became a business, not a calling.
The doom of this country is that there is a significant portion of the electorate (mostly lefties) that believes that their god’s (Big Government) primary obligation is to smite those of us proles they just don’t like. This is why no one appears to know (or care) that pols from both parties are simply “doing business” (the way the Corleones did business).
As far as the Fed audit: one has wonder if the resistance to an audit is the fact that if the magnitude of the fraud were know, the fallout couldn’t be contained.
KCRob- there is a derivatives bubble that was 20x larger than the GDP of the entire planet back in 2010. If you look into it you might want to get a nice boyfriend, flee to a whiteopia, get a nice garden/greenhouse & stockpile freeze dried food + weapons. If you are related to the tribe that runs the fed you might want to hide it.
Jeff do you want to touch the rent seeking gays getting grants to translate a book about gay cats?
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/03/pink-sfs-2015-business-plan.html
“People who would otherwise make an honest living as burger flippers or rent boys in the free market are on a form of government dole that incentivises them to make bad art, which helps to drown out works by people with actual talent.”
Government agencies and quasi-government agencies have a way of avoiding audit and/or investigations. So much for transparency. It is a one way street, us to them, but never them to us.
@7: the part that’s hard to figure out about the derivative and debt bubbles is what, exactly, will happen when they pop. About all we can be certain of is that it won’t be great.
All the money lent to, say, Greece (or unqualified home “buyers” in the sand states) is that the money they borrowed was created from nothing (ex nihilo). So, strictly speaking, no one is losing money in the sense that they lent someone money they won’t see again. But all that new money is out there somewhere – created from nothing and, therefore, not really worth much.