So the Federal Reserve announced this afternoon that it will spend a trillion dollars to prop up securities prices.
The Fed doesn’t have the money, so they will print it up and have a fling at the market.
Remember when Martha Stewart got sent to prison for alleged comments she made regarding an alleged $40,000 in insider stock sales?
The crimes that are occuring with the Fed’s insider trading are probably 100,000 times as great – and, unlike Stewart’s transactions, the Fed is doing real damage to real people.
The Fed’s trillion dollar escapade is a stab in the back to every American with a savings account.
Ron Paul’s proposed bill to Audit the Fed is a step in the right direction.
But the audit should be only the first step. The laws on fraud and deceit should be brought down full force on these rascals.
Hopefully Americans will wake up one day and realize that the AIG bonuses are not even chicken snuff compared to the scams official Washington is carrying out…
I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 program a couple of weeks ago where past finance officials from Zimbabwe were being interviewed. The story was that Mugabe and Co. (once the revolutionary Marxist darling of England and Scotland) are profiting immensely from favorable exchange rates while the rest of the country is beginning to use trillion dollar notes for toilet needs!
I don’t think we run any chance of that here, but I do hate to see savings attacked so directly.
It does make you wonder after that disaster of a T-Bill auction this week whether ol’ Bonzo Bernanke is running scared. ‘Hey, nobody showed up to buy our sh*t. Uh, I know, why don’t we just buy it from ourselves.’
Yes, the AIG bonuses are just another exercise in misdirection from the real scandal in that scam that we call government.
Who was the biggest beneficiary from the bailout of AIG? None other than Paulson’s old firm Goldman Sachs.
Link to Radio 4 program about Zimbabwe here. I think it’s out of date (thank you BBC and DRM), but it will be replayed at some point. It’s nothing revelatory, just interesting to hear those astronomical numbers.
Hopefully Bernanke can be ‘brought to justice.’
Unfortunately the Two Minute Hate against AIG seems to be working pretty well as a distraction…only folks like us are even talking about anything else.
There is a sordid irony around the symmetry of $32 million bucks going as bonuses to the employess who have alreasy left AIG and so are not being “incentivized” and the reported $32 BILLION bucks lost down the rathole of Iraq as part of that brown -bag , “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” phase of the Iraqi fiasco. Seems to me the august members of Congress demanding names and adwesses of AIG Lucre Recipients should provide the names and adwesses of all the various freebooters who have profited in Iraq. Funny, but the current bonus twittering would seem to pale in comparison with a government that is aware, through it’s own accounting departments that the Debt as a percentage of GDP is now skyrocketing to an expected 600% toward the end of this century. Remember that the historic high of this important statistic was 109% during WWII, within a relatively flat trajectory of 30-50 % until 2007.
Needless to say, about 52% of our besotted budget goes to “defense” , debt service and Medicare/Medicaid………..a kind of diminishing returnicentric domination of the Federal Budget.
Certain passages of the Declaration of Independence would appear to be the only fitting reply for the various pronouncements of the Congressional Record these days.
I’m so glad that we don’t have a Dept of “Offense” at the Federal level.
Jean, We do, it’s replaced the Separation of Powers in a syndicate we can call the Congexecudiciary whose primary responsibility is planning a trip to Zimbabwe on a “Fact Finding ” mission where notes will be compared against the French Credit Mobilier Affair, the Weimar and the Dutch Bulb Craze to decide how best to paint our little immersion in un-economic Economics with red white and blue highlights so that penury becomes patriotic.
The Digger Shoshone of the Great Basin based their idea of who was wealthiest by who could give the most away but I don’t expect the average American to enjoy a life of chasing Jackrabbits, eating locusts and occasionally serving as target practice by the United States Cavalry.
At this point, I am convinced that the whole toxic asset thing is a manufactured crisis and Geithner’s plan is a huge scam. This thing is complicated and needs further elaboration.
But, Geithner’s plan did not escape China’s attention, and perhaps they read Sheldon Richman’s article today at FFF about not buying US debt. The People’s Bank of China wants a new global reserve currency. If this happens, Obama might as well outsource the US Treasury’s operations to Parker Brothers – or maybe we can all just print up our own money at home.
Here’s what the Chinese think:
http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english/detail.asp?col=6500&id=168