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Forum Post: Resolved: "End the Fed" = Spam

Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 9, 2011, 10:52 a.m. EST by 666isMONEY (348)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

Professor Richard Wolff spoke at OWS. Here's from his website where he says the Fed is NOT the problem:

Is the federal reserve the real source of power/control in a society of capitalism?

To be clear, I think the FED and how it works is definitely a part of the problem - that is, part of the economic system that imploded in 2007-2008 and whose immensely costly social effects are now hurting millions of our fellow citizens. After all, how could it be otherwise? The FED is the central bank of the US, our equivalent of the Bank of England, the bank of France, etc. in other countries. Its job is to serve and also coordinate and protect the banking system in the US (overwhelmingly private) as well as to execute monetary policy aimed chiefly at price stability and secondarily at countering business cycles. The FED therefore manages the supply of money in the system and manipulates certain important interest rates as well.

However, the determination of what the FED does, how, when, and with whom, flows from the larger economic context. It is the capitalist economic system the set of interacting private enterprises, markets, instabilities (business cycles), and contradictions (tensions between employers and employees, between competitive and monopolized industries, small and big businesses, and so on) that shapes FED actions. I do not think it is the essential cause of what happens in that larger context. I do not think anything is such an essential cause. I refer to the present economic crisis as systemic precisely to underscore that it is the system and not one part of it that is our problem to solve by transforming it.

The FED was established early in the 20th century because of the instabilities of the private banking system - in those days they were called, appropriately enough, "bank panics." Many people then thought they could manage capitalism's costly business cycles not by changing the system but by a banking reform, establishing a central bank called the Federal Reserve System. As usually happens with reforms, the system bent the reform institution to its ways rather than the other way round. The FED has been no more effective in preventing business cycles than the system before. In other words, these cycles are a problem of the economic system - capitalism - as a whole. They are not solvable by this or that change of this or that part of the system. Getting rid of the FED will no more solve the problem of cycles than establishing the FED did.

Of course, various groups will try to capture the FED (as they do with other governmental or quasi-governmental institutions) to make them serve particular interests. They may sometimes succeed, but that too does not address or solve the bug issues, the systematic issues of a system like ours. So my focus is always to address the systemic roots of our economic and social crises and on that basis to propose systemic changes or transformations as the only realistic responses given the failures to date of the non-systematic reforms focused on establishing or disestablishing this or that institution within the system.

http://rdwolff.com/content/federal-reserve-real-source-powercontrol-society-capitalism

3 Comments

3 Comments


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[-] 1 points by Dutchess (499) 12 years ago

lolll...Do Americans know their income tax goes SOLELY to pay interest to the Federal Reserve ( an Independent agency within our govt) for money they NEVER had in the first place and had it ordered to be printed by the Treasury?

Come on people....Property taxes go to public education, gasoline taxes goes to building roads...

Wake up and STOP believing what someone 'educated and qualified' is telling you.

I was against these unconstitutional wars from day one and made predictions about it on local live tv at the time. How come little nobody like me knows history, a very short story of much of the same repeats it self over and over again...STOP...and THINK and RESEARCH for yourself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[-] 1 points by 666isMONEY (348) 12 years ago

Would U rather have Congress control the money supply?

Interest on loans is slavery.

Consumer goods are cheap now QE1 & 2 has not caused inflation or devaluation of the dollar . . . dollar is gaining on world currencies.

[-] 1 points by omniscientfool (84) 12 years ago

The fed is unelected and unacountable. The rising cost of all consumer goods can be directly traced to QE1 & QE2 devaluation of the dollar.

Keeping intestine rates so low have also had a massive effect on the average Joe, yes it costs less to borrow money, but savings, CDs, pensions etc also earn less money.

The fed is the problem