Saturday, November 28, 2009

Audit the Fed

As anyone who follows politics realizes quickly, some things stay the same, some things change. I've been shocked that this Audit the Fed bill, pushed by Rep. Ron Paul, has gotten as far as it has. First off, who cares about monetary policy? Second, with super corrupt politicans running both parties, who'd a thunk that they would support the audit of an organization that so many of them, just months ago, said should run the unsupervised distribution of trillions of taxpayer dollars. Ahhhh yes, the voters are mad. I guess that still makes a difference in this day and age. Voters getting mad has changed, politicians doing anything to keep their jobs has not.

I encourage you to watch this whole video, it's not super long, just over 13 minutes. Take the time to understand how confused some of these experts are on the difference between auditing an organization and controlling it (would they object to a corporation getting audited as the same thing as relinquishing control of it?). Look how mad the opening Republican is. I also especially like the ending of it, where the healthcare bill slips into conversation, as does Clute, TX.












2 comments:

Roller said...

From the video: "One of the great strengths of our country is the independent Fed".

Funny. Completely agree, Rye.

Squawk Box is actually a pretty good show, I find it entertaining and informative with respect to financial news, but they don't hide their political opinions well. In some ways, that is part of the entertainment, though. Joe Kernan, the lead anchor who introduced Paul and joked about "Clute", cracks me up pretty frequently. It's like having Alex P. Keaton host a show. And it wasn't as easy to tell from his body language, but it sounded like Rick Santelli (the guy who said he choked when hearing the quote that was cut off) was actually in agreement with Paul.

On a slightly related note, check out this WSJ article. It details a government report that contradicts Goldman Sachs' stance that it wouldn't have suffered material losses if AIG weren't bailed out by the government. Makes you wonder, once again, just who on Wall Street is friends with who in D.C.

The link I provided is actually to Google search results. Most wsj articles are available only to paid subscribers, but if you come in through Google, they give you the entire article for free. It should be the first result, but if not, the title of the article is "Report Rebuts Goldman's Claim on AIG".

Ryan said...

Thanks Rolls. I've never seen Squawk Box before, but I'd like to hear more of your thoughts about it. It seems like a mostly financial show? One of the things I like about financial shows and money people is that they tend to cut through the smoke and get right to the point. I think they had a fairly good debate in a short amount of time.

Another good thing about the show is that I was shocked it was nearly 15 minutes long. Seriously? The Federal Reserve is arguably in financial terms more powerful than Congress and yet is completely sheltered from election justice and oversight, and yet it is a show called Squaw Box that gives more attention to them than was given at any point during the last presidential primaries or elections. Did either party allow any questions to be asked during any of the debates?

In that sense, money folks (thankfully) are all about the bottom line.

Interesting WSJ article as well. I had read about that, that a lot of the bailouts were "implicit". If you keep pulling the thread on that sweater, you will also find that ungodly amounts of money went directly through our firms to overseas banks, so that our taxpayers actually bailed out a ton of foreign firms and banks in a similar fashion.

This is why I bristle when people try to blame homeowners in this mess. Sure, there's a lot of responsibility to go around, but the homeowners have paid the pooch for their mistakes whereas the more responsible, powerful, profitable and knowledgeable parties have not even in the least been slapped on the wrist. Indeed, they have been rewarded instead.