Should We Kill the Fed?
by Patrick J. Buchanan

04/03/2009


For the financial crisis that has wiped out trillions in wealth, many have felt the lash of public outrage.
Fannie and Freddie. The idiot-bankers. The AIG bonus babies. The Bush Republicans and Barney Frank Democrats who bullied banks into making mortgages to minorities who could not afford the houses they were moving into.
But the Big Kahuna has escaped.
The Federal Reserve.



"(T)he very people who devised the policies that produced the mess are now posing as the wise public servants who will show us the way out," writes Thomas Woods in "Meltdown."
Already in its sixth week on the New York Times best-seller list, this eminently readable book traces the Fed's role in every financial crisis since this creature was spawned on Jekyl Island in 1913.
The "forgotten depression" of 1920-21 was caused by a huge increase in the money supply for President Wilson's war. When the Fed started to tighten at war's end, production fell 20 percent from mid-1920 to mid-1921, far more than today.
Why did we not read about that depression?
Because the much-maligned Warren Harding refused to intervene. He let businesses and banks fail and prices fall. Hence, the fever quickly broke, and we were off into "the Roaring Twenties."
But, the Fed reverted, expanding the money supply by 55 percent, an average of 7.3 percent a year, not through an expansion of the currency, but through loans to businesses.
Thus, when the Fed tightened in the overheated economy, the Crash came, as the stock market bubble the Fed had created burst.
Herbert Hoover, contrary to the myth that he was a small-government conservative, renounced laissez-faire, raised taxes, launched public works projects, extended emergency loans to failing businesses and lent money to the states for relief programs.
Hoover did what Obama is doing.
Indeed, in 1932, FDR lacerated Hoover for having presided over the "greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history." His running mate, John Nance Garner, accused Hoover of "leading the country down the path to socialism." And "Cactus Jack" was right.
Terrified of the bogeyman that causes Ben Bernanke sleepless nights -- deflation, falling prices -- FDR ordered crops destroyed, pigs slaughtered, and business cartels to cut production and fix prices.
FDR mistook the consequences of the Depression -- falling prices -- for the cause of the depression. But prices were simply returning to where they belonged in a free market, the first step in any cure.
Obama is repeating the failed policies of Hoover and FDR, by refusing to let prices fall. Obama, with his intervention to prop up housing prices and Bernanke with his gushers of money to bail out bankrupt banks and businesses are creating a new bubble that will burst even more spectacularly.
The biggest myth, writes Woods, is that it was World War II that ended the Great Depression. He quotes Paul Krugman:
"What saved the economy and the New Deal was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs."
This Nobel Prize winner's analysis, writes Woods, is a "stupefying and bizarre misunderstanding of what actually happened,"
Undoubtedly, with 29 percent of the labor force conscripted at one time or another into the armed forces, and their jobs taken by elderly men, women and teenagers with little work experience, unemployment will fall.
But how can an economy be truly growing 13 percent a year, as the economists claim, when there is rationing, shortages everywhere, declining product quality, an inability to buy homes and cars, and a longer work week? When the cream of the labor force is in boot camps or military bases, or storming beaches, sailing ships, flying planes and marching with rifles, how can your real economy be booming?
It was 1946, a year economists predicted would result in a postwar depression because government spending fell by two-thirds, that proved the biggest boom year in all of American history.
Why? Because the real economy was producing what people wanted: cars, TVs, homes. Businesses were responding to consumers, not the clamor of a government run by dollar-a-year men who wanted planes, tanks, guns and ships to blow things up.
"The Fed was the greatest single contributor to the crisis that unfolds before us," Woods writes of today, and "more dollars were created between 2000 and 2007 than in the rest of the republic's history."
After 9-11, the Fed kept interest rates low -- in one year as low as 1 percent. That money flooded into the housing and stock markets. And in 2008, as the Fed tightened, the bubble burst.
Now the money supply is again expanding, to rescue us from a crisis created by the previous expansion. Of Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States, the great Andrew Jackson was eloquent.
"It has tried to kill me," he said. "But I will kill it." And he did.
Should not this creature from Jekyl Island, for all its manifold crimes and sins against the republic, also be summarily put to death?

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Libertas inaestimabilis res est - Liberty is a thing beyond all price. | Sic Semper Tyrannis

Yes kill it.

yes we should.

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And now that April 15 is approaching, the date we have to have our financial confessions turned over to Cesare, let's keep in mind that the checks we send are going directly to the Federal Reserve as payment on the debt created every time a new Federal Reserve Note is printed and issued out of thin air.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

YES. I argue for its destruction with many on campus. many people have no idea how underhanded the centralized banking system (federal reserve) is.

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Its all a lie! http://www.rollitup.org/grow-journal...ml#post2479535

Just for fun, bounce the idea of abolishing the Fed off of one of your Marxist economic professors and see what he/she says.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Yes watch the proffesor have a hissy fit.

HR1207 has 55 co-signers to Audit the FED. Lets get Shariff Brody and Hooper to go down to the Docks and cut open that shark, see what its been eating.

The fed was created to stabalize the money supply but has only inflated it. The dollar has lost 95%+ of its value. The only people who benifit from inflation is the government and government satalite companys who get to use the new inflated money first. To you and me it means higher prices and a loss in our savings.

Alan Greenspan:
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."

James Madison:
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."

James Paul Warburg:
"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent."

Barry Goldwater:
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States."

G. D. McDaniel:
"If, as it appears, the experiment that was called 'America' is at an end ... then perhaps a fitting epitaph would be ... 'here lies America the greatest nation that might have been had it not been for the Edomite bankers who first stole their money, used their stolen money to buy their politicians and press and lastly deprived them of their constitutional freedom by the most evil device yet created --- The Federal Reserve Banking System."

The FED is the tool for global curruption wealth and power for the most powerful people in the world kill it before we end up like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6_i8zuffs

Do we get to kill the people in charge of the fed too?

Pretty please......... ?

Maybe honestly maybe. If it is found that they are manipulating the system for the benifit of a few powerful banks (which it is beleived they are) at the expence of the nation and its people. A case could be made for treason considering the power/sovreignty we have given up now to the IMF in the last few days. Not to mention what these same people pulled in other countries. It may not be technecly illegal but it should be. String them up!