Posts Tagged ‘Federal Reserve’
December 2nd, 2011 by John Feehery
Earlier this week, Bloomberg Business reported:
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger. Read more...
Tags: Bernanke, Bloomberg, Federal Reserve, Ron Paul
Posted in Theory | No Comments »
August 17th, 2011 by John Feehery
“I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history, is almost treacherous, or treasonous, in my opinion”.
That was Rick Perry’s comment about Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve.
Karl Rove said that the comments “went too far.” Others called them unpresidential. The current President, Mr. Obama, said it was a sign that Mr. Perry wasn’t quite ready for prime time.
From an historic standpoint, the Texas Governor’s statement was more than a little bit interesting. Perry has positioned himself as a conservative populist. A hero to social conservatives (witness the National prayer service thing he hosted). He also fancies himself to be a populist, fighting against Washington and New York banking interests.
Historically speaking, though, his fight against Bernanke’s easy money policy is a fight for New York banking interests. This was most notable in the fight in the late 19th century between interests that wanted a bimetal system that would expand the money supply by basing the currency on both silver and gold, and those who wanted to constrict the money supply by basing it purely on a gold standard. Read more...
Tags: America, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Conservatives, Cross of Gold speech, Democrats, Economy, election, Federal Reserve, GOP, Government, Presidential election, Republicans, Rick Perry, spending, William Jennings Bryan
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Politics, Presidential election, election | No Comments »
July 29th, 2011 by John Feehery
I like to call myself a Libertarian, but I am really not.
I don’t really want government to disappear. While I read The Fountainhead in college, and I admit I have found it to be influential in my life, I think Ayn Rand was a little kooky and her objectivism philosophy is unworkable in the real world.
My brother, the Tea Partier is a Libertarian. He wants government to shrink dramatically. He wants police forces to be shrunk, he wants teacher’s pensions cut, he wants most regulatory bodies eliminated. He finds government to be oppressive and he wants it to be gone.
He also believes that for the last forty-five years, America has been living a lie. He hates the military industrial complex, he hates the Federal Reserve, he wants to go back to a Gold Standard. He thinks we should never
have gone into Iraq and believes that the Soviet Union would have fallen without the Reagan buildup, and he believes that the banking system in this country is essentially corrupt.
He also finds Michele Bachmann to be appealing and he appreciates what Joe Walsh is doing in stopping the debt limit extension. Read more...
Tags: Ayn Rand, Federal Reserve, Gold Standard, Government, Internet poker, Iraq, Joe Walsh, John Boehner, Libertarian, medicare, Michele Bachmann, national defenses, Social Security, Soviet Union, taxes, Tea Party, Tea Party libertarians, The Fountainhead
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Food, Foreign Relations, GOP, Government, History, Laws, Media, Politics, Promises, Theory, corruption, election, health care, medicare, national security, spending, taxes, war | 1 Comment »
February 18th, 2011 by John Feehery
The trade union movement started in medieval Germany as a way for artisans to band together to perfect their craft.
The craft unions now perfect ripping off the taxpayers.
Unions used to target big, mean industrialists who paid minimal wages and exploited workers.
Unions now target Democrats in primaries who don’t tow their line.
And their line is never ever give an inch when it comes to ripping off the taxpayers.
It is trite to say that the federal government is going broke. But as long as the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department can get the Chinese to buy our bonds, our brokenness is more notional than visceral.
At the state level, though, it is more than a notion that bankruptcy looms. The pension system in Illinois is due to collapse any day now. California is a complete mess every year. And the list goes on.
In Wisconsin, the new Governor has decided that he has to change the deal when it comes to the unions and the taxpayers. In Wisconsin, a progressive state, the taxpayers have finally had enough of the rip off. That is why they elected a Republican governor who had a plan. Read more...
Tags: Chinese, Economy, Egypt, Federal Reserve, Government, Illinois pension, local government, middle-east, Politics, Republicans, spending, state government, Treasury Department, unions, Wisconsin
Posted in Economy, Government, Politics, Theory, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2010 by John Feehery
On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day in 1978, the New York Times reported that the House approved by legislation, which established the official policy of the United States, that the unemployment rate should be 4%. “The bill authorizes the use of fiscal and monetary policy, public service jobs, job training and counseling and all other means to achieve full employment…The legislation was supported by a coalition of labor, civil right, liberal, religious and women’s groups and was backed by President Carter.” Amendments offered by Republicans to require a balanced budget and achieve an inflation goal of 3% were rejected, and most GOPers voted against final passage of the bill, calling it an empty promise.
The key emotional moment in the debate came when Senator Muriel Humphrey, Hubert Humphrey’s widow, came onto the House floor to a thunderous round of applause.
Of course, the Humphrey Hawkins law wasn’t enough to save President Carter, who ended up getting bounced out of office two short years later. Mr. Carter’s economic policies did him in, as stagnant growth, high inflation and high unemployment conspired to kill his reelection campaign. Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Conservatives, Democrats, Federal Reserve, Government, Humphrey-Hawkins law, Inflation, Obama, Politics, reform, Republicans, Senator Muriel Humphrey, spending
Posted in GOP, Government, History, Laws, Politics, Theory, spending | No Comments »
April 16th, 2010 by John Feehery
The American people don’t like bailouts, unless it is they themselves who are getting bailed out. And even then, being bailed out leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
TARP has popularly been described as a bailout, and maybe it was. But without TARP, the financial system would have completely crashed, and believe me, millions of Americans would have come to the government, asking for their own personal bailout.
America, as a society, has been over-leveraged. The federal government is over-leveraged. Investment houses were over-leveraged. Most consumers were over-leveraged.
What does that mean? It means they were buying stuff that they couldn’t afford. The government was buying a prescription drug bill, two wars, and a bunch of other stuff, including now a new health care bill, without either getting more revenue or cutting spending elsewhere.
Investment houses were making huge bets with little money to back up the bets. And they were betting that the housing market would continue to rise for the rest of history. In some cases, these smart investors were betting 40 bucks for every one dollar they had in the bank. And they were making stupid bets. These are the geniuses that we entrust with all of our pension funds and retirement savings. Read more...
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Bailout, bankruptcy, banks, Chuck Schumer, Economy, Federal Reserve, Goldman-Sachs, Hank Paulsen, Michael Lewis, Rahm Emanual, spending, TARP, Wall Street
Posted in Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, Theory, spending | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2008 by John Feehery
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday put the U.S. dollar squarely on the Fed’s radar screen, saying its slide against
other currencies has led to an “unwelcome” rise in U.S. inflation and may be a factor in inflation expectations. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed is unlikely to lower official interest rates further, though his remarks suggested that – barring a further rise in inflation expectations – the Fed probably won’t contemplate higher rates until there is more stabilization in home prices.”
Well, thank God somebody has started to talk about fixing the precipitous decline in the dollar.
I did a post on this a couple of months ago.
According to the experts, core inflation hasn’t gone up. But guess what? Housing costs play a huge role in determining “core inflation.” Since house prices are falling faster than the Titanic’s anchor, this is a unrealistic view of inflation. Prices are falling on houses because there was a bubble, not because of larger economic reasons. Falling prices is not good news for all those people who have all their money tied up in their homes, especially those Americans who are inside out on their mortgages. Read more...
Tags: Congress, dollar, Federal Reserve, Inflation, Republicans
Posted in Government | No Comments »
May 27th, 2008 by John Feehery
@ 12:04 pm
Brian Wesbury, a Chicago economist, has a great op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today, entitled “Déjà vu: The Fed’s Interest Rate Dilemma,” that is the best explanation I have seen about what is happening to the dollar and how to fix it.
Wesbury’s theory is that easy monetary policy has devalued the dollar and made bad situations in the energy and food sectors much worse. “Since 2001, and especially since September 2007 — when the Fed starting cutting rates in response to credit market issues — excessively easy monetary policy has driven oil and other commodity prices through the roof.”
Wesbury goes on to say: “The good news is we’ve been here before, and we know — well, at least 1980s Fed Chairman Paul Volcker knows — how to get out of this mess. Loose money in the 1960s and 1970s drove up the price of everything. A barrel of oil, which sold for $2.92 in 1965, rose to $40 in 1980. Most people believed that rising commodity prices indicated that the world was running out of resources … In 1980, then-Fed Chairman Volcker lifted the Fed funds rate significantly above GDP growth and held it there long enough to end inflation. This policy instigated a steep decline in oil prices, and drove a stake through the heart of stagflation.” Read more...
Tags: dollar, Federal Reserve, Government, Politics
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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