The Federal Reserve Has Been a Disaster for America

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Like all indoctrinated economics PhDs, I used to teach students that the Federal Reserve was created as a central bank in order to provide cash to banks experiencing a run on deposits so that bank failures would not become general and collapse the money supply and, thereby, employment and output.  It all sounds so reasonable and rational until you realize that finance least of all is idealistic.

The Federal Reserve was actually created in order to save the big New York banks from their greed-driven mistakes, and that is the Fed’s principal activity. In recent decades the Fed has gone beyond merely saving the big banks from their mistakes to helping the big ones concentrate more banking into their hands.  The Fed causes banking crises and then provides funds for the big banks to absorb the troubled regional banks.  The Fed’s current policy of raising interest rates after a decade of negative interest rates has the entire banking system insolvent. This resulted in runs on the banks, which the Fed did not save by expanding reserves, instead permitting failure and acquisition.  Obviously, what I had been trained to teach was false.

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THE WALL WAS TOO HIGH, AS YOU CAN SEE

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

As I have witnessed and lived through the last three dystopian years of mass hysteria, mass delusion, and mass mental illness, I find myself drawn to the same thinkers, social commentators, and musical artists over and over. The wisdom, wit, and clarity of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Roger Waters in describing a world gone mad makes me feel less alone in my observations about humanity, politicians, governments, bankers, billionaire funded NGOs, war mongering psychopaths, and entities intent on shredding the social fabric of this country and the world.

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Federal Reserve & Misconceptions

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

There is an onslaught of misinformation about the Federal Reserve from everything that it can go bankrupt, and the Treasury will become a second central bank, and of course, the Fed is really the cause of inflation and its balance sheet. The proposal by Janey Yellen to buy in long-term debt and swap it with short-term is not “creating” money for the Treasury has no such power. It was a proposal for a debt swap to shorten the yield curve. The first proposition that the Fed can go bankrupt only suggests that people do not comprehend that the Fed is different entirely from the European Central Bank.

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IT’S NOT A LIE IF YOU BELIEVE IT

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”George Orwell, 1984

It's not a lie if you believe it – Seinfeld Memes

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

It’s as if O’Brien and Mustapha Mond are running the show, using behavioral conditioning, restricting freedom of speech, adhering to a strict caste system, surveilling everything we say or do, using our fears to control us, utilizing propaganda to produce false narratives, and ultimately threatening to stomp a boot on our faces forever if we do not obey and conform. Virtually everything we are told by politicians, government bureaucrats, military brass, “esteemed” journalists, medical “experts”, bankers, and corporate executives is lies. They do not believe their lies, but they know it benefits themselves financially to lie, and as long as they work together, they know the ignorant masses will believe them.

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IT’S A FOURTH TURNING: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

What You Should Know About Getting Snowed In - CLC Lodging

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

I’ve been pondering this Fourth Turning in articles since its spectacular onset in September 2008, with the Wall Street/Federal Reserve initiated global financial implosion. The description above is apt, as this ongoing two-decade long storm gains intensity and our freedoms, liberties and rights are slowly extinguished as the electricity flickers and our modern civilization reverts to a more brutish state of antipathy among competing tribes, based on race, gender, class, party, geographic location, and now medical status.

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Have Central Banks Crossed the Line into Tyranny?

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

With all the conspiracy theories that somehow the bankers are the real culprits in creating excess money supply, there has been an evolution in central banks that has finally crossed the line since 2019. The Federal Reserve was, once upon a time, responsible. The Fed was originally designed as an authority to create money, which was an elastic money supply. That made perfect sense when the Fed was designed in 1913.

Yes, the bankers owned the shares BECAUSE the Fed was actually designed to do what JP Morgan did in herding the bankers together to save the day during the Panic of 1907. Morgan convinced the bankers that if they did not chip in money to bail out the troubled banks, panic would unfold, and ALL the banks would be hit as a contagion. They listened and joined his effort to stem the Panic of 1907. The design of the Fed was to recreate what JP Morgan put together. The shareholders were the bankers because it was a bail-out fund for the bankers, and TAXPAYER money should not be used to bail out the bankers.

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Federal Reserve Folly

Guest Post by John Mauldin

Federal Reserve Folly

Great news: The US economy is officially out of recession. We know this because the National Bureau of Economic Research’s official recession-calling committee said so this week. The economy has been in an expansion phase since last April, making this the shortest recession on record at only two months.

The NBER committee always makes these calls in hindsight—both the beginning and end of recessions. Literally everyone could see the economy coming to a halt in March and April. The signs weren’t subtle. Yet it wasn’t until June 8, 2020, that they said the economy had peaked in February, marking the recession’s onset. I don’t blame them for waiting to see the data, though. Caution is appropriate on these things.

But really, 15 months to affirm the economy has been expanding? Their statement was quite specific. They call April 2020 the bottom because that month showed clear troughs in unemployment, GDP, PCE, and personal income ex-transfers. All this was known long ago.

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