Federal Reserve Resorts to Open Blackmail of the American People

So the Federal Reserve is now claiming that any efforts to audit it's activities will result in higher interest rates. This is nothing short of bald-faced blackmail. We're getting a little reminder from the Fed of who really holds the reigns of our failing Empire. Message from the Fed to America: expose us and what we do, and we will destroy what is left of the American economy. Story at Bloomberg...

Congress has no business in our monetary policy! :grr:

And that is in Congress receiving money from its patrons.

Article 1 section 8.

:sarcasm:

Now I take writing at face value. Pretty hard to tell them from Republiks.

the fed exerts its power to manipulate interest rates by creating the impression that they have essentially unlimited market power by way of a huge cash hoard and so when they set target interest rates, anyone who tries to push rates outside the target will get burned when they intervene and move interest rates back.

well, what they're saying here in typical fed-speak is that they do NOT, actually, have THAT huge a hoard of cash, and so, people might be able to figure out, in some cases, how the market can overrule the fed on interest rates. moreover, the market could screw the fed and cause it to lose a ton of money. any market participant whose cash position and stated market goals are known is vulnerable to getting screwed and the fed is no different.

in truth, the market often does overrule the fed in terms of long-term trends, but i'm talking about short-term decisions where the fed could be made to lose a ton of money in a short period of time for no good economic reason other than that all their cards are on the table.


this, of course, is even more disturbing than an actual audit. they're basically admitting that an audit would be embarassing.

As you seem to say at the end, whether one calls it blackmail or an honest warning about the risks, what you say is yet another reason to go ahead with the audit, accepting the short-term costs as a necessary first step toward completely changing a system that necessarily produces instability, as well as unsustainable and unjust inequalities of wealth.

any government has a limit to their influence, and tends to multiply this via mystique.

if the fed becomes exposed via an honest audit, then they'll have to limit the market power of all participants some way to protect themselves. that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but it would be a complete non-starter politically.

maintaining the value of the Dollar depends upon a foundation of lies. Maybe that helps us in the short run, but nothing based on lies - monetary systems, governments, relationships, etc - has any long term prospect of success.

We need to take our medicine and take a hard, open look at the foundations of our financial system. Keeping our heads in the sand will solve nothing.

... it's a full-blown delusion. We are collectively mentally ill when it comes to our nation's financial system.

it became obvious when we went off the gold standard; money's only worth what we trust it to be worth. if a government can't protect its currency, it quickly loses a ton of value.

but even with the gold standard, that doesn't change much, as a huge portion of gold's value is similarly based on vapor - the world's historical tendency to value quite highly a yellow metal with comparatively little practical value.

By hook and by crook.

How to change that? Everyone who has ever managed to acquire enough power to try to wrestle back some control from the banking cartel has been eliminated. Like JFK, or in a bloodless assassination as in the case of Eliot Spitzer.

Cheers to every single person who takes a whip to chase the moneylenders back where they belong.

If any person ever tried to operate the scam that the central banking system does, they would be locked up for fraud. They literally have a world wide license to steal from the entire population of the earth.

because we can no longer afford them. :crazy:

The independence of the Federal Reserve is very important.

All countries in the eurozone have ceded their monetary policy to a lawfully independent European Central Bank. Are they blackmailing the people of Europe?

The economic benefits of a central bank free of political influence are not a myth.

are unproven. In fact, the economic risks of an un-accountable CB are becoming quite evident.

Also, the EU Central Bank IS subject to external audits, unlike the Fed. And they are not suggesting to the people of the EU that higher interest rates will result from accountability measures. So no, they are not blackmailing the people of Europe. That's a really poor analogy actually.

We really only have two choices: A central bank controlled by unaccountable super-wealthy elites operating first and foremost for their own benefit, or a central bank controlled by a democratically chosen government, accountable to the people. The first is subject to the influence of secretive interests working for their own enrichment, and the other is subject to potential political pressure (mitigated by checks and balances).

It's really an admission of a lack of faith in democracy to suggest that option number one is a better choice, especially in light of the ongoing catastrophic failures of the current system.

Try applying your same logic to any other function of government and see how absurd it sounds.

The Federal Reserve is neither Federal (It actually is privately owned) and has no reserves.

It came into being because Congress was led to believe that by creating such an institution, then we would not have to worry about Depressions.

Well, in return for creating this bank, we got the hugest Depression ever - a mere 16 years later. And now we are facing another huge Depression. (Once the Banksters run through the huge amounts of money we taxpayers have given them.)

We should have a national bank that is run by Congress - I would be fine with Kucinich and Issa running it. I am not for Issa on Social Issues, but he has a great understanding of what should have been done last year. And the needed actions would not have entailed creating new laws, simply applying the laws created to deal with the Savings and Loan crisis of the eighties. Banks in each region of our nation would be offered a state charter, and would be offered the Federal BailOut monies, in return for the actual fact of loaning out these monies to their customers.

Thus Main Street rather than Wall Street would have been helped. Instead, good old Bernanke and Geithner stuck it to the tax payers, who will see either massive inflation or massive taxation to make up for the eleven trillion and plus that they have thrown around to try and stave off catastrophe.

AIG and Goldman Sachs have done great under the Bernanke/Geithenr scenario, but the average person is facing extinction.

:puke:

get credit. Expose the bastards.

Now we can't audit them. The only possible justification would be that it exposes them doing something wrong.