For a moment, imagine that there is a privately-owned organization in
the United States that can create U.S. dollars out of thin air whenever
it wants and can loan that money to whoever it wants to. Imagine that
this organization is able to act with the full power of the U.S.
government behind it, but that nobody in the organization is ever
elected by the American people, and that for all practical purposes the
organization is not accountable to the president or to Congress. Imagine that the organization is able to make trillions of dollars of
secret loans to banks, to foreign governments and even to their close
friends without ever having to face a comprehensive audit. Does that
sound preposterous? Well, such an organization actually exists. It is
called the Federal Reserve, and today we found out that once again the
Fed is going to be taking huge piles of your money and loaning it to
commercial banks in Europe. The Congress cannot overrule this
decision. Neither can Barack Obama. Because it has so much power, many
refer to the Federal Reserve as "the fourth branch of government", but
unlike the other three branches of government, there are basically no
significant "checks and balances" on the Federal Reserve. If you don't
like the fact that the Federal Reserve is racing in to help big foreign
banks survive the European debt crisis that is just too bad. The
Federal Reserve pretty much gets to do whatever it wants to do, and the
folks over at the Fed simply do not care whether you like that or not.
So what in the world just happened today? The following is how an article on CNBC explained it....
Just ahead of the Wall Street open Thursday, the
European Central Bank, along with the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of
England, Bank of Japan and Swiss National Bank announced they would
offer three-month dollar loans to Europe's commercial banks, easing
dollar funding constraints.
It must be nice to do whatever you want without having to get the approval of anyone else.
What do you think Barack Obama would give for such power right about now?
The Federal Reserve and other major central banks around the world
decided that lending big European banks gigantic piles of dollars would
be a good idea, so they are just doing it.
No debate, no votes and no democracy - they just tell us how things are going to be and that is that.
It is a bit ironic that all of this happened on the third anniversary
of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It is almost as if the central
bankers of the world are trying to send some sort of a message.
So how much money is going to be loaned out?