Operating on a fractional reserve basis, the Federal Reserve Bank is empowered to create money on its own credit. Or, out of thin air.
Janet Yellen, the woman in charge of the larder and the laundering, has opted to keep “its interest-rate guidance intact on Wednesday, passing up an opportunity to inch closer to exiting its ultra easy monetary policy,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
“An economic circus,” counters Ron Paul: one person determines the money supply and the interests rates which affect us all in what is a crisis of debt.
Audit the Fed, a Paul initiative, has just passed in Congress, but other than shine some light on the “shenanigans”—the monkeying with the money done by the Fed—any initiative by a corrupt legislature is likely futile in the long run.
Even when America’s official cognoscenti—those who see to the dissemination of information—finally report reality as it is, they will typically obfuscate it by cleaving to the truth as they see it. What do I mean? The title of a PBS news story covered on Labor Day is “U.S. optimism lags behind economic gains, study finds.” The subterranean message PBS is transmitting with the title is that Americans have failed to notice the “steady economic recovery” afoot. Too dense, perhaps? In fact, the headline twists the researcher’s finding, as he states them, for he did not make any mention of these so-called “economic gains.”
Smart.
The fact “that more people feel there’s been permanent damage [to the economy] now …” tells me that the cohort questioned is cognizant that something in the (inflationary) policies pursued by DC, irrespective of who’s in power, is “damaging” their prospects for good, and that whatever the stock exchange is doing; this has no bearing on their financial well-being.
… 42 percent say they have less in savings and salary now than they did five years ago.
And they say that their current economic status for three out of five of them is either fair or poor. And so they have had some diminution of the quality of life. We asked two questions that allow us to try and frame this, whether they have had a major or minor change in the quality of their life and whether it’s been temporary or permanent.
And we have one-third in the country — so that’s 80 million people — who say there has been a permanent impact or their quality of life, either major or minor. So whatever has happened in the stock market and other indicators is not getting through to Main Street at all. People are struggling, and there’s been no letup really in the last five years. …
… We asked them how much confidence they had in Washington’s ability to solve problems. Just 2 percent said a lot. Another 20 percent said some.
If they had to choose between President Obama or the Republicans in Congress to handle the economy, they said neither of the above at 40 percent. And they don’t think unemployment is going to get better even if the Republicans take both houses of Congress in the fall.
Warns David Stockman, author The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America:
If you allow a $17 trillion debt to be financed at $250 billion a year when it really should be $700 billion or $800 billion under normal interest rates, then politicians are gonna take the easy way out. They’re not going to fall on the sword. They’re not going to lay out the real painful choices to the public. They’re not going to vote against the squeaky wheels and the powerful constituents when the Fed is printing the money and doing the job of financing the debt for them.
So I think that’s where the crisis comes. When the Fed finally reaches the point where the entire monetary system is threatened – and I think it would be if it had continued at $85 billion a month – we come to the juncture where the Fed can no longer keep its big fat thumb in the market buying up the monthly and weekly issue of Treasury debt. At that point, we are going to see the rubber meet the road, so to speak. We’re gonna have the day of reckoning, because there isn’t demand out in the real marketplace among real investors for massive amounts of additional Treasury debt at these sub-economic interest rates. And when interest rates normalize, Katy, bar the door, because the carry cost on the federal debt— which will by then be $20 trillion— will soar by half a trillion a year. The politicians will finally panic, but I’m afraid by then it might be too late—- that we’ll be in a very serious bond-market crisis.
The markets like that the Federal Reserve will not follow through on its promise to stop buying government bonds at a pace of $85 billion a month. But what right does the Fed have to steal percentages off our income via this form of inflation? asks the Only Moral Congressman to have served in recent years. Why punish savers, especially poor pensioners, by eroding their purchasing power?
Ron Paul predicts a collapse of the bond market and the further weakening of the dollar.
As if Quantitative Easing were not deceptive enough a term, now we have “tapering.”
The money mafia had been “easing” to the tune of $85 billion in monthly bond purchases. If they’ve admitted to this much, you can be sure it’s much more.
The consequence of Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus, of course, is a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. It should be obvious too that an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in it value.
… gold prices are suddenly soaring, following the Federal Open Market Committee saying Wednesday it will continue its push to buy $85 billion of debt securities a month.
Investors poured into gold between late 2008 and mid 2011 as the Fed injected trillions of dollars into the economy. Gold investors speculated the government’s intervention and stimulus would spark inflation, which is bullish for the yellow metal.
Gold set a record of $1,921 an ounce on Sept. 6, 2011, and jumped more than 70% between December 2008 and June 2011, Bloomberg News says. But gold prices have slipped this year as investors expected the Fed to pull back on stimulus.
