I am not in the “dissolve the Fed” camp, but I do think they were a major cause of the crisis and collapse due to their ultra-low rates, and nonfeasance when it came to enforcing bank lending standards.
Regardless, i found this infoporn via Column Five Media to be rather interesting:
>
click for ginormous graphic
chart via Column Five Media
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. —John Kenneth Galbraith
Putting aside its incredible product line and pipeline of more, its still attractive valuation relative to earnings, and its $100 per share of cash that may be used for a dividend soon, Apple's stock has gone parabolic. And, parabolic moves always end one way, back to the place where the parabolic move began. Now, AAPL can of course power higher to who knows where in this move but the largest market cap stock in the world has now entered a tenuous phase, strictly technically speaking. But I digress. German investor confidence, the ZEW, in the next 6 months rose back...
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January 19th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Dude, you find the greatest shizzle !
You are da bomb
January 19th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Big ups for the mad props, my nizzle.
Fo shizzle, your kind words are greatly appreciated.
It is true, I am da bomb, and also, I am quite phat.
We now return to 2010, and our previously recorded programming.
January 19th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Ron Paul!
January 19th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Read that Ron Paul quote. What is he suggesting here?
He obviously understands that the Constitution does grant Congress the right to print money. But he doesn’t like that it’s been delegated to a central bank. So, he would rather have Nancy Pelosi decide when and how much money to print rather than Ben Bernanke.
How dumb is that?
January 19th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
At least we can vote our representative out of office, at least in theory. Anyone care to see my anti-gerrymandering amendment to the constitution?
I have suggested direct election of Fed Governors as a half-joke. I’m not sure the electorate can do much worse than Congress.
January 19th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
That Thomas Jefferson quote is fake. There’s one by J.P. Morgan at the Pecora hearings that I would have used instead: “All the money and all the banks in Christendom cannot control credit.”
Cuts right to the heart of why central banking as such is a terrible idea.
January 19th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Let us at least be clear, that in a free society a Fed would not exist. Without laws suppressing the use of market-produced money[usually gold] to pay debts & make contracts, who would use the faith-based fiat stuff?
January 19th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Who are the 7, on the Board of Governors?
I see Bernochio, Kohn,Warsh, Duke, and Tarullo listed on their website.
Who are the other two? Are they running with only 5 since Mishkin left? Why?
Is the Comptroller of the Currency and the Treasury Secretary still permitted on the Board?
Even when they aren’t keeping secrets, the way they run the place looks like a crack shack in Compton.
January 19th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s[sic] laws”
..nor who checks its grammar, apparently.
January 19th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Erm yeah. So instead of explaining the very well know mechanisms by which the fed decides to do things, lets just pretend it is too “opaque” and that there is an “aura of mystery” about it. Because that codes well for the “cabal” of “conspirators” who run the fed, at least by the paranoids that put out this crap.
So guys. There aint enough gold in the world to run a gold standard that makes sense anymore, and the “empty” dollar is still a better gauge of wealth than gold will be again. The fed is necessary, because unregulated markets always go straight to monopolies, and if you think there is a lack of accountability now, imagine what the Robber Barons could do unfettered with the power of total media control.
It cracks me up to listen to the Paulites complain about opacity with the fed… try finding out what is really going on in any major corporation. Shareholders and boards of directors can’t get straight facts now! Imagine them with no regulation.
January 19th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Mysticdog:
We didn’t have a central bank system and The Fed before 1913. How did the USA survive all that time? We had the industrial revolutions too. We built up a lot of wealth didn’t we?
January 19th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
It is impossible to know what really goes on in large organisms with any degree of accuracy. How much accuracy depends on the character of the executives, managers, and employees of the company. Every year it gets more obvious that the moral character of nearly our entire population is more and more rotten.
Think about it. The larger the entity, the easier it is to lie, cheat a little, or a lot, fudge, turf build, create false panics, phony budgets, false sales and expense reports, for years. Don’t even look at the blatant fraud in ‘booking the budget’ instead of what the auditors tell you is going on (with their zany samples, derived from Eco 1 Stat Anal). When you realize how pervasive this kind of fantasy land accounting (or lack of it) that goes on every day, isn’t it pretty damned conclusive that overly large organizations are like massive wooden ships of old, dry rot here, wet mold over there, and from the inside, out a gradual deterioration that is masked by evermore lipstick on the pigs until the tipping point and then down she goes.
(or in the case of TBTF, is morphed miraculously by the government into a spiffy Cigarette life boat for The Captain and his Tenilles.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
There seems to be some controversy about this according to Wikiquote, but I still think it’s one of the best quotes about the Federal Reserve System.
The American Mercury by George Jean Nathan, Henry Louis Mencken, 1924, p. 56 [2]
“President Woodrow Wilson-( After breaking with the engineers of the Fed Act, and near his death), “I am a most unhappy man; unwittingly I have ruined my …”
See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Woodrow_Wilson
Of course, what followed was “Coolidge Prosperity”. Oh yeah, and then the Great Depression.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:32 pm
You guys would have loved the 1890′s. http://jpetervanschaik.googlepages.com
January 20th, 2010 at 12:56 am
Mysticdog Says:
“There aint enough gold in the world to run a gold standard that makes sense anymore”
There is plenty of gold. The question is what is the appropriate price per ounce, considering the debasing that’s been going on. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff318.html
Would it circulate? That is highly unlikely, except possibly for high value transactions, like real estate.
““empty” dollar is still a better gauge of wealth than gold will be…”
Not when the Fed and the Banks can continue to create ever more credit and digital dollars out of thin air, debasing the purchasing power of existing money. Their inflation of the money supply is the greatest threat to wealth. It is far more pernicious and
Debt based fiat, that is “borrowed into existence”, is inherently flawed. It transfers wealth, in the form of interest to the bank from the producing and productive individual or firm. There never exists in such a system enough positive wealth to pay off the debts and creates a need for ever more debt to be created to service the existing debt plus interest.
“The fed is necessary, because unregulated markets always go straight to monopolies”
Only those markets that are natural monopolies, for which other market boundaries and regulations can be established. Fortunately, banking isn’t one of them. And it should be clear by now, the Central Bank is a horrible regulator. They do not work for the interests of the People and the Economy, they work to protect the interests of the banking industry.
Perhaps you should spend some time here: http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse
Get educated and have some grounding for your comments.
A little less mystic(ism) and a lot more facts and consideration would do you good, dog.
January 20th, 2010 at 2:33 am
The fed is necessary, because unregulated markets always go straight to monopolies
“Since we don’t want any monopolies, let’s establish a monopoly central bank with total control over all legal tender, and ban the conduct of any commerce in scrip other than that issued by that central bank.”
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Banking and the creation of currency and credit is one of the least monopolizable economic activities there is. It took decades of government guarantees including the FDIC, the Greenspan put, and bailout after bailout in order to create today’s insolvent mega-banks. The free-wheeling nineteenth century had nothing approaching their size and control of the nation’s deposits.
January 20th, 2010 at 2:37 am
You guys would have loved the 1890’s. http://jpetervanschaik.googlepages.com
And the Fed boosters apparently love the 2000′s (and whatever’s coming down the pike the next few years). Anyone can cherry-pick some time of low economic growth from a given period and spin it into an indictment of that period’s political and financial arrangements. It’s a monkey level argument.
January 20th, 2010 at 4:32 am
http://www.zerohedge.com/forum/central-banking-vs-repubic
Central Banks are like Enlightened Despots…not likely to live under one.
They only work when they link money supply and credit creation to real growth of hard manufactured goods and services freely chosen. Alan the Debaser killed the golden goose that Paul the Enforcer made right.
January 20th, 2010 at 7:58 am
[...] -The Anti Fed Fact Sheet – The Big Picture [...]
January 20th, 2010 at 9:09 am
I am no fan of the Fed, but many of the points made in this chart are factually incorrect or misleading. Some examples:
1)” The Fed the only for profit corporation in America that is exempt from both federal and state taxes…” True. But 100% of the Feds profits are paid into the Treasury, which is effectively the same as a 100% tax.
2) The Fed can “seize all valuable assets directly”. Not true. Being authorized to purchase something is not at all the same as being able to “seize” assets by eminent domain.
I could go on but I won’t. This diagram is probably from the same “tinfoil hat” conspiracy theorists that made that movie “zeitgeist”. It’s fun and thought provoking stuff (I highly recommend the movie as an academic lesson in effective propaganda)… But it’s not true.
January 20th, 2010 at 9:58 am
“effectively the same as a 100% tax” .. hummm .. but the missing dialog is BB & his current team see all data* .. which can react in real time in this cash driven world of which inventions of instrument vehicles exist for profit via the labor of the world … imo the world is getting so complicated of a machine …. well .. ya better watch out ya better not cry ya better not pout I’m telling you why .. why .. because you were warned
* data provided by super-corps to the head office
January 20th, 2010 at 11:27 am
@carlwied
1)The Fed tells you what they think is profit..100% of what is non-audited isn’t worth a rat’s patootie to a forensic accountant.
2)The Fed is like DeBeers, the classic South African diamond sighting deal. You get invited or you don’t play. You take what is in your box. Have you tried shopping your menu ideas at Rao’s if you are a newbie?
With all due respect, why go on, indeed. In gratitude that you choose to rest here, for
your truth is your truth. As a Solipsist, I care otherwheres or otherways.
January 20th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
“It’s a monkey level argument.” Why thank you, Graphite. I’m glad you recognise the anti-Fed rhetoric for what it is, although you do malign the intelligence of monkeys just a tad. As soon as someone starts touting the gold standard it screams the message they are totally out of touch with reality. I would even expect a more intelligent position from monkeys. http://jpetervanschaik.googlepages.com
January 21st, 2010 at 3:27 am
As soon as someone starts touting the gold standard it screams the message they are totally out of touch with reality.
I’m not advocating any standard whatsoever … merely that legal tender laws be repealed so that individuals can choose to conduct their affairs in whichever form of currency suits them best. If that happens to be Federal Reserve Notes then fine, more power to the Fed.
It’s central banking advocates who want to force a standard upon the world. Without legal tender laws, people would be unlikely to accept the government’s debt as money.
However, just like that monkey James Grant, there are aspects of the gold standard which I do admire, including its resistance to manipulation to serve the whims of meddlesome social engineers, and its natural maintenance of relatively well-balanced international trade flows.