Wall Street

From MSNBC to The Mises Institute, lots of noise is being made over the happenings on Wall Street over the weekend.

Most of the cops picked up another day toward retirement and maybe a story or two.

What a sordid adventure this has been.

A month or so ago I asked myself a question,

"Who owns the Fed?"

Foolishly thinking that having asked that question, at about 8:30 am on a Saturday morning, I'd have a post done by noon at the latest.

Just another example of just how wrong one can be, when one is wrong.

If you ask the above question of your search engine, it goes nuts.

I read a lot of it.

I'm a little mad at myself here because if you follow some of this stuff far enough, you get to part about the escaped, homosexual, occultist Nazis hiding underground (literally) somewhere in Argentina ....... with grey space aliens.

I am not making this up.

Hell, I couldn't make it up.

Anyway, what I'm mad about is that I lost that link.

You can believe me when I tell you I'm lookin' for it.

But I digress.

Evidently lots and lots of people have asked this question, long before I did and have posted/published their answers.

Then a whole other group read the first group's post/publication/book and felt a need to dispute those answers.

Now, wouldn't you think that it should be easy to determine the ownership of something as important as the entity the controls the money supply of the world's largest economy?

This is the information age after all, don't you think that a simple list might be easily obtainable?

It ain't.

Factcheck.org provides the best start here  .

I'll wait.

Click it and read it dagnabit, it'll only take a minute and I'm trying to make a point here.

Thank you.

Now, if you click on their sources, from the Fed itself, you get this , and then this .

DO IT!!!

You don't even have to read anything this time.

See what I mean?

Hmmmmm, is all I have to say about this.

Then there are the vids.

The vids now, are a whole new ballgame.

And while a lot of the vids are very good and entertaining, none of it is as helpful as I would have liked in answering the original question, "Who owns the Fed?" because one needs to have a much better than none at all understanding of the nature of money, before any of the above makes even one lick of sense.

So, here's where I start.

The following comes from a definite Libertarian point of view, and while some may prefer a different viewpoint, it is very clear and easy to grab hold of.

It'll take about 40 minutes but you will most likely be entertained and a hell of a lot smarter about the world around you than you are now.

Go get a beer, a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, maybe a sandwich.

Got all that?

I'll be back on issues having to do with that non existant list in a bit.

 

You go Rolling Stone.

Despite their inability to quite put down the cool aid (see their comment below, "According to popular legend, we're broke) Rolling Stone has glommed on to the fact that the FED is accountable to nobody.

It's a start.

Click on the Victor Juhasz illiustration below for the entire piece.

Recommended

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

 By MATT TAIBBI APRIL 12, 2011

As far as I'm concerned, Peggy Noonan is one of the finest writers in America.

I make my son read her editorials in the Wall Street Journal (he hates it) ... (I don't care).

Here's her analysis of what went wrong with the mortgage market.

Click anywhere below to get the entire piece.

You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses.

You got to run around and crow about how under your watch everyone became a homeowner.

You shook down the taxpayer and hoped for the best. 

"Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats:

'Look what I give you!'

Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans:

'I'm a homeowner, I've got a stake, don't raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!'

And Wall Street?

We went to town, baby.

We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay their mortgage.

As if we cared.

We invented financial instruments so complicated no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.

"You're finaglers and we're finaglers.

I play for dollars, you play for votes.

In our own ways we're all thieves.

We would be called desperadoes if we weren't so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness.

If there were any justice, we'd be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks.

Only we'd both make sure we missed, wouldn't we?"

I think that just about covers it.