Originally Posted by
jungle
They were secret until a recent Federal law suit forced them to reveal loans made to the EU among many other things. There is no Audit of the Feds activities on an annual basis.
I see that your audit statement is qualified, but make no mistake; the Fed Reserve gets regularly audited by independent sources.
This does not imply the need for a gold standard, there were many bank failures under the gold standard. The point is that proper and open management of fiscal and monetary policy is vital to a healthy economy, secret deals and high debt spell disaster no matter what is used for currency.
Printing money to meet shortfalls is just a tax applied to all to pay for excess debt.
Oddly enough, "printing money" goes hand in hand with run away inflation, yet we have one of the lowest interest rates periods in US history.
There have always been bank failures. I lived through the Savings and Loan failures of the 1980's, which of course existed concurrent with the Fed Reserve.
I do not support the likely outcome of the elimination of the Fed. Which congress critters do you want running that new monetary institution?
The debt, adjusted for inflation as a percentage of GDP is higher than it has ever been when both funded and unfunded liabilities are accounted for and this is what most of us just don't understand.
Yes, the debt is huge; that is undisputed by anybody. My issue is that a Fed Reserve bank "did it", as the 100 point post suggests (and as I've heard from numerous folks in the same breath of "gold standard").
Pure and simple, a largely balanced fed budget 15 years ago (yes, there are the usual shenanigans in the accounting of that) had a Fed Reserve bank. The Great Depression had both a Fed Reserve, and a gold standard until 1933. The booming 1950's and 1960's had a Fed Reserve.
It has been there in the good and bad times in the past 100 years.
Tony, it is factual that only about half of us pay federal income taxes, if you dispute this you have not been paying attention.....
I don't see where I even addressed this issue, but yes, that's a fact. EDIT for clarity... I mentioned it in my post above, but did not dispute the simple fact.