On Oct 7, 2011, at 10:08 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> what is this obsession with the fed some of these folks have? could
> someone give my lazy ass an executive summary?
It fits perfectly with the conspiratorial mindset. It's a fairly opaque institution that does work for the big guys. But it's not their puppet - a friend who spent many years at the NY Fed once told me that within the institution, the thinking is that bankers come and go but they have to do the long-term thinking for the ruling class. So it has more autonomy than the paranoid allow. The founding of the Fed is also a great subject of mythmaking - secret meetings involving a few Jews. There were some of those, but there was also agitation among the elite for a decade or two before the Fed's founding to create a central bank. And although the Fed does put U.S. interests first, it is internationally minded, and consults constantly with its foreign counterparts. This is also rich soil for conspiratorial thinking - that, plus the Jews. (Greenspan. Bernanke. You'd almost forget that Volcker's middle name is Adolph.) And it's tempting to see this body as controlling everything - it's complicated and messy to think about how financial markets work, and the Fed's relationship to those markets. Much easier to think of the FOMC controlling everything.
Also, the right hates central banks because they're state regulators of money. They much prefer gold, which is stateless and automatic - and painfully austere. That makes sense from their POV. The lefties who pick up Ron Paul's line on the Fed don't really understand that he has a coherent political philosophy. When says "end the Fed" he means "switch to gold." Again, that makes sense from his POV. But why an unemployed kid should embrace the gold standard, well, that makes no sense.
I'm going to write something on this for my radio commentary later today, and I'll post the text when I do.
Doug