Image by SushiFugu via Flickr
When Terence Jeffrey, writing for CNSNews.com, noted that true federal spending for the fiscal year 2010 wasn’t $3.7 trillion after all, but closer to $11 trillion, he discovered an old accountant’s trick to make things look worse (or better) than they are: either double count, or don’t count at all.
In the process of sorting out the accountant’s trick, however, Jeffrey uncovered an unnerving fact:
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s address to the National Press Club on Thursday was a remarkable blend of hubris, claimed innocence, and warnings.
His opening remarks were condescending and patronizing to the journalists assembled:
Image via Wikipedia
With the announcement by Reuters that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was going to resign shortly from the Obama administration came the temptation to reminisce about Volcker’s influence during the late ’70s and early ’80s when inflation exceeded 13 percent and interest rates on short-term government Treasury bills hit 21.5 percent.
Image via Wikipedia
As part of the backroom deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years, the GOP gave the progressives an extension of one of their favorite welfare-state building blocks: unemployment insurance—which will undoubtedly add to the long lines of suffering Americans in our country.
Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany in the 1880s, first introduced the concept of state-mandated unemployment insurance. It was then forcibly introduced in the United States during the Great Depression under the Roosevelt administration and has been expanded regularly ever since. In fact, the proposed extension would be the sixth such expansion since June of 2008.
Image via Wikipedia
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recent 60 Minutes interview raised more questions than it answered. Some even questioned the questions. Gary North explained that the Fed chair was being pushed to defend his decision to purchase more government securities in order to stimulate the economy. Interviewer Scott Pelley was at an admitted disadvantage, and failed to ask Bernanke exactly why he thought additional stimulating would work when past stimulations haven’t.
As North suggested, Pelley should have asked Bernanke “Why?”
Cover of END THE FED
In defending the Federal Reserve against what CNBC considered to be “an unprecedented level of attacks,” former Fed governor Frederic Mishkin said it was because of the Fed’s inability to “articulate a clear message regarding its trillion-dollar monetary policies”:
Monetary policy is never easy. You’re always the whipping boy. The question [now] is the degree. Now you’re getting whipped with a little bit harder lash than usual. But you’ve got to make the tough calls….
Image via Wikipedia
William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, defended the Fed’s recent announcement to print more money (called Quantitative Easing) to stimulate the moribund economy. Dudley, who is also the vice chairman of the Fed’s FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), and former chief United States economist for Goldman Sachs, said that the decision to increase the supply of money was only to reduce interest rates further and not to devalue the dollar. He said, “We have no goal of pushing the dollar up or down. Our goal is to ease financial conditions and to stimulate a stronger economic expansion and more rapid employment growth.”
Image via Wikipedia
In a remarkable show of both contempt and hubris, the Federal Reserve System announced that it will be celebrating its 100th birthday at exactly the same place where it secretly started, in Jekyll Island, Georgia.
The first meeting was carefully concealed from the public, as attendee Frank Vanderlip, President of National City Bank of New York (representing Rockefeller and Kuhn-Loeb banking interests) noted later:
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says the country is in trouble, many aren’t listening, partly because the media wasn’t there reporting on it, and partly because those listening can’t understand what he’s saying. Speaking at the Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council on Monday, the best he could do was “There is no way around it—meeting these challenges will require…the public to make some very difficult decisions and to accept some sacrifices.”
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks on Friday at the Fed’s annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed-watchers from around the world will be hanging on his every word, phrase, and nuance for clues. They’ll be listening to hear that the chairman knows what’s happening in the economy, and that if things get worse, he has a plan.
Image via Wikipedia
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker sent up a trial balloon at the New York Historical Society April 6 when he said that a Value-Added Tax (VAT) needed to be considered in light of the huge deficits facing the country. According to Volcker, the VAT is “not as toxic an idea” as many have considered it to be in the past, and “if at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes.”
He wasn’t the first one to float this recently. Charles Krauthammer wrote late last month that “as the night follows the day, the VAT cometh” and that “a national sales tax near-universal in Europe is inevitable.” Because of the huge deficits facing the nation, exacerbated by the newly passed ObamaCare bill, there is no way out except to raise taxes, according to Krauthammer.
Image by @mjb via Flickr
A preliminary vote today for Ben Bernanke’s reappointment to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve is expected to clear the way for a final favorable vote by the Senate.
Bernanke’s first term record was subjected to criticism and praise during confirmation hearings in December, and he was selected as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald was kind to a fault, calling Bernanke “our mild-mannered economic overlord” (a reference, no doubt to Superman’s mild-mannered Clark Kent), and “the most powerful nerd on the planet.” In that lengthy tribute, Grunwald summarized the Fed’s role:
Image via Wikipedia
An article in the New York Times asked that since the Federal Reserve “failed to recognize the last bubble…why should Congress, or anyone else, have faith that future Fed officials will recognize the next [one]?”
The roots of the present Great Recession stretch back to the bursting of the last bubble—the tech bubble—in the late 1990s. As the stock market declined sharply, the Fed under then-chairman Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates in an attempt to keep the economy from collapsing. The Times succinctly noted in its overview of the credit crisis that “lower interest rates make mortgage payments cheaper, and demand for homes began to rise, sending prices up. In addition, millions of homeowners took advantage of the rate drop to refinance their existing mortgages. As the industry ramped up, the quality of the mortgages went down.”
Image by Scott Butner via Flickr
The 60 percent gain in stocks since March was largely caused by secret government purchases of stock-index futures, the CEO of TrimTabs claims.
The Plunge Protection Team (PPT), otherwise known as the Working Group on Financial Markets, has been the target of conspiracy theorists ever since an article in the Washington Post in 1997 first shed light on the operation. The Working Group was created by Executive Order following Black Monday’s market crash on October 19, 1987, when the stock market declined more than 20 percent in a single session. Its purpose was to give recommendations for legislative and private sector solutions for “enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of financial markets and maintaining investor confidence.”
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Regulatory failures and not low interest rates were responsible for the housing bubble, implosion and current recession, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asserted on Sunday.
“Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lender’s risk management would have been…more effective [in] constraining the housing bubble [rather] than a general increase in interest rates,” Bernanke told the American Economic Association. Bernanke, while awaiting Senate confirmation for another term as Fed Chairman, defended recent and continuing charges that the Fed contributed significantly to the current financial crisis by keeping interest rates too low for too long.
Last Monday, the Federal Reserve unveiled its new “term deposit facility” as another tool to fight inflation.
It was reassuring to note that the Fed has finally defined inflation’s causes properly: as a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services.
With the enormous increase in money and credit that the Fed has engineered over the past year, concerns are being raised about the coming rise in the general price level. These concerns are being reflected in the recent declines in the bond market as investors appear to be demanding higher interest rates to offset some of that anticipated rise.
Long-renowned economist Paul Samuelson died on December 13 at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, at the age of 94. In addition to writing Economics in 1948 — which became the best selling economics textbook for several decades, having been translated into forty-one languages and selling over four million copies — Samuelson also won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970.
The chorus of accolades of effusive praise continues to resonate:
He also promoted the Federal Reserve, and the job he is doing as head of the Fed) in an op-ed piece he wrote recently in the Washington Post where he assured readers (and Congress) that “the Fed played a major part in arresting the [financial] crisis, and we should be seeking to preserve [the Fed’s] ability to foster financial stability and to promote economic recovery without inflation.”
Image via Wikipedia
In its attempt to glorify “the 10 who shaped the U.S. economy the most since 2000,” ABC News did a great favor for those interested in the interconnections among the “elite” who are impacting the current world economic and political scene.
Naturally, much was left unsaid about these “captains,” especially regarding their connections to the elite currently in charge. In order, then, here is a brief look at each of these “10 who shaped the U. S. economy”:
Latest Comments