Madam Speaker, I rise to introduce the Federal Reserve Transparency Act. Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy. How long will we as a Congress stand idly by while hard-working Americans see their savings eaten away by inflation? Only big-spending politicians and politically favored bankers benefit from inflation.
Serious discussion of proposals to oversee the Federal Reserve is long overdue. I have been a longtime proponent of more effective oversight and auditing of the Fed, but I was far from the first Congressman to advocate these types of proposals. Esteemed former members of the Banking Committee such as Chairmen Wright Patman and Henry B. Gonzales were outspoken critics of the Fed and its lack of transparency.
Since its inception, the Federal Reserve has always operated in the shadows, without sufficient scrutiny or oversight of its operations. While the conventional excuse is that this is intended to reduce the Fed’s susceptibility to political pressures, the reality is that the Fed acts as a foil for the government. Whenever you question the Fed about the strength of the dollar, they will refer you to the Treasury, and vice versa. The Federal Reserve has, on the one hand, many of the privileges of government agencies, while retaining benefits of private organizations, such as being insulated from Freedom of Information Act requests.
California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California’s bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.
Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.
A person might think that California’s plight would introduce some realism into Washington, DC, but it has not. President Obama is taking steps to intensify the war in Afghanistan and, perhaps, to expand it to Pakistan.
Economists continually try and sell the public the idea that recessions or depressions are a natural part of what they call the “business cycle”. This timeline below will prove that is simply not the case. Recessions and depressions only occur because the Central Bankers manipulate the money supply, to ensure more and more is in their hands and less and less is in the hands of the people.
Central Bankers developed out of the ancient money changers and it is with these people we pick up the story.
48 B.C. Julius Caesar took back from the money changers the power to coin money and then minted coins for the benefit of all. With this new, plentiful supply of money, he established many massive construction projects and built great public works. By making money plentiful, Caesar won the love of the common people, but the money changers hated him for it and this is why Caesar was assassinated. Immediately after his assassination came the demise of plentiful money in Rome, taxes increased, as did corruption.
Eventually the Roman money supply was reduced by 90 per cent, which resulted in the common people losing their lands and homes.
30 A.D. Jesus Christ in the last year of his life uses physical force to throw the money changers out of the temple. This was the only time during the the life of his ministry in which he used physical force against anyone.
Even though the Federal Reserve is now the biggest single participant in the financial system, the myth of a “free market” still lingers on. It’s mind boggling. The Fed has expanded its balance sheet by $2 trillion, guaranteed $8.3 trillion of dodgy mortgage-backed paper, provided a backstop for bank deposits, money markets, commercial paper, and created 8 separate lending facilities to ensure that underwater financial institutions can still appear to be solvent. The whole system is a state subsidized operation buoyed on a taxpayer-provided flotation device which bears no resemblance to an invisible hand. More astonishing, is the massive power grab engineered by the Fed which has taken place without the slightest protest from 535 shell-shocked congressmen and senators. Elected officials have either kept their finger in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing or timidly caved in to Treasury’s every multi-billion dollar demand. It’s flagrant blackmail and everyone knows it. Congressional oversight is an oxymoron.
Anyone who has followed the financial crisis from its origins knows that the Fed’s bloody fingerprints are all over the crime scene. Still, that hasn’t stopped well-meaning liberal economists (Krugman, Stiglitz, Reich) from supporting Bernanke’s increasingly unorthodox attempts to flood the financial system with liquidity (“quantitative easing”) and invoke whatever radical strategy pops into his head. In fact, many of the experts believe that Bernanke should do even more given the sheer size of the meltdown. There’s growing support for a gigantic stimulus package ($700 billion) which will focus on road construction, infrastructure, state aid, extensions to unemployment benefits and green technologies. The Obama camp hopes that government programs and deficit spending will make up for the huge losses in aggregate demand which threaten to drag prices down even further in a self-reinforcing deflationary cycle. Even so, its natural to wonder at the wisdom of giving even more power to the very people who created the mess to begin with and who seem more interested in proving their depression-fighting theories than throwing a lifeline to struggling homeowners, consumers or auto workers. Maybe its time to try something different.
Economists continually try and sell the public the idea that recessions or depressions are a natural part of what they call the “business cycle”. This timeline below will prove that is simply not the case. Recessions and depressions only occur because the Central Bankers manipulate the money supply, to ensure more and more is in their hands and less and less is in the hands of the people.
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Designed by