Let's take a good hard look at the Federal Reserve [View All]

This video might help.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7065177340464808778

A bit long - some 47 minutes. But it is not the product of any right wing blather.

Among things I would like to see - somebody laying out their definition of what the Federal Reserve should be. Starting with the fact that it should be a government entity and not a private corporation.

Remember, The Fed's main selling point at the time of its creation was that it would help stabilize the economy. Avoid bank panics. See to it that hyper inflation not become economic policy as usual.

I found it curious in poking around the internets yesterday that the economy's money supply was over stimulated during the Roaring Twenties to a troubling 62 %.

And right now we don't simply have hyper inflation happening here - we have it globally. And And right now it stands around 62 %.

You can hardly talk about the fed without talking about their non-protesting of the economic bubbles that have littered the economy for the last fifteen years. First we have the dot com bubble, then the real etate bubble.

or as a recent article in Harper's stated:
"A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences.

After the dust settled from the 1720 crash of the South Sea Bubble, for instance, British Parliament passed the Bubble Act to forbid “raising or pretending to raise a transferable stock.” For a century this law did much to prevent the formation of new speculative swellings.

Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours."

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I think the only thing left out of those three paragraphs from Harper's is the need to point the finger at the media - they were and are all too happy to lap up whatever investment adviser from whatever bank has to say about how this "new economy" is not a bubble but a different type of economy than ever witnessed before - a market whose prices can "only go up and never go down."

Barnum would have to amend his statement that you can certainly fool many of the people again and again and again.