75% Favor Auditing The Fed; Fed Job Approval Rating Lower Than IRS

[girl gone mad]

75% Favor Auditing The Fed; Fed Job Approval Rating Lower Than IRS
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/07/75-favor-auditing-fed.html">MISH'S Global Economic Trend Analysis


Here's some genuinely good news for a change. A new http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/july_2009/75_favor_auditing_the_fed">Rasmussen poll shows 75% Favor Auditing The Fed.

So much for the ongoing secrecy of the nation’s independent central banking system. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Americans favor auditing the Federal Reserve and making the results available to the public.

Just nine percent (9%) of adults think that’s a bad idea and oppose it. Fifteen percent (15%) aren’t sure. Over half the members of the House now support a bill giving the Government Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative agency, the authorization to audit the books of the Federal Reserve Board.

While the president hopes to expand the Fed chairman’s regulatory controls, 46% of Americans say he already has too much power over the economy.

Fifty-one percent (51%) oppose expanding the Fed’s regulatory powers.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/07/75-favor-auditing-fed.html">More...

[Lorax7844]

1. K and R

[sonias]

2. The Nation article on the Fed - Dismantling the Temple

The Nation 8/3/09
Dismantling the Temple
By William Greider
July 15, 2009

(This article appeared in the August 3, 2009 edition of The Nation.)

Congress should step up its investigations of the roots of the financial crisis and slow down the rush to weak solutions--especially the empowerment of the Federal Reserve.

During the past year, the Fed has flooded the streets with money--distributing trillions of dollars to banks, financial markets and commercial interests--in an attempt to revive the credit system and get the economy growing again. As a result, the awesome authority of this cloistered institution is visible to many ordinary Americans for the first time. People and politicians are shocked and confused, and also angered, by what they see. They are beginning to ask some hard questions for which Federal Reserve governors do not have satisfactory answers.

Where did the central bank get all the money it is handing out? Basically, the Fed printed it, out of thin air. That is what central banks do. Who told the Fed governors they could do this? Nobody, really--not Congress or the president. The Federal Reserve Board, alone among government agencies, does not submit its budgets to Congress for authorization and appropriation. It raises its own money, sets its own priorities.

I say let the transparency in the FED begin!

Sonia

[ArcticFox]

6. There's a common misconception in there

"The Federal Reserve Board, alone among government agencies, . . . " The Federal Reserve is NOT a government agency. Never has been. It is, in simple terms, a bunch of banks working together. It's just that they were smart enough to know if they gave themselves a name like "The Fed," everyone would just assume they were the federal government. Unfortunately, even supposedly critical articles often report as if the Fed is a part of the government.

[truedelphi]

8. Thank you for saying that.

The Federal Reserve - A quasi legal entity, one that is semi private, semi Federal, and that has laissez faire in terms of setting policy for the interest rates, creating bubbles and destroying them when ever it wants (With always the same inner circle of banking families escaping from any economic trauma.)

And Bernanke says it is wrong to state that the tax payers are on the hook for his actions - Why, he told Sixty Minutes, it is not the money from their taxes that he uses, no, not at all - he simply sets up an account for whoever he has deemed needs the money and sees that the correct amount of money is recorded inside that account.

Why should any of us bother our pretty little heads over such a great system?

[AnneD]

9. Thank you....

when I am talking with every day folks and we talk about the FED-they are absolutely stunned when I tell them that little nugget. These people-who we have little say in managing just gave away billions of our money to Wall Street. When that sinks in they are ready to lynch Bernanke.

[TiredOldMan]

3. Why Not?

Why wouldn't we audit an agency handling $ Trillions? ALL of the use of our tax money should be transparent.

[followthemoney]

4. All we need now is a government that cares. nt

[LeftHandPath]

5. Audit, then abolish...

We dont need a banking cartel to tell us what rate to lend to banks.

The model is a total failure. Rescind the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and let markets decide what rates should be. And let Congress control monetary policy, just like in the Constitution.

[Po_d Mainiac]

7. Encouraging numbers!

If 75% favor an audit, then only 25% are either on the GS Kool-aid, or dumb as a box of rocks. :evilgrin:

[AdHocSolver]

10. The Fed is essentially a private corporation of bankers set up to control the U.S. economy...

...for their own profit by manipulating the interest rates and the money supply.

The stock market boom and bust and the real estate boom and bust were made possible by the Federal Reserve's maintaining artificially low interest rates and manipulating the size of the money supply by allowing overly liberal lending practices.

Low interest rates "encouraged" people to take their savings out of the banks and buy stock shares which appeared to be increasing in value "faster than the inflation rate".

It was the investors' very act of buying stock that drove the prices up. There were no big profits coming down the pike. The economy was all fabricated a la Enron's phony bookkeeping. If people hadn't thrown their savings into the stock market (demand driving up the prices), there would have been NO stock market boom. It was a Ponzi scheme.

The real estate "boom" was also made possible by the Fed's keeping interest rates artificially low. This encouraged people, at the urging of the real estate and banking industry, to buy more house than they could afford. The adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) was designed to sell buyers on committing to higher priced mortgages than they could afford. Buyers were told that the "boom" would last for years, and the buyer could always sell the house at an even higher price before the higher rates kicked in, and then pull the same stunt with their next house purchase.

This is exactly the kind of scams that were pulled by the banks in the 1920's, enabled by Federal Reserve policies, that led to the stock market crash and bank failures in 1929, and the depression of the 1930's. FDR's New Deal legislation included banking regulations, such as the Glass-Steagall Act, which effectively made many of the scams illegal. These regulations were overturned starting in the 1990's, including repeal of Glass-Steagall.

When guys like Greenspan claim that they "couldn't have possibly known how bad things would get", that is nonsense. They were using the same playbook used by their predecessors in banking and the Federal Reserve in the 1920's.

[AdHocSolver]

11. Delete duplicate n/t