More On The Fed

Commentary By Ron Beasley

 It takes something special to get Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and Libertarian Ron Paul on the same side but as we reported here that something is the black hole known as the Federal Reserve.

The threat to audit the Federal Reserve has chairman Ben Bernake and others in a real panic mode.  Gary North:

Usually, when Ben Bernanke is interviewed, he has the demeanor of a college professor in the presence of freshman students. Of course, as a full professor, he did not have to teach freshmen. That is for untenured assistant professors to do. Stammering and stuttering are therefore a real departure for him. There is a reason for this.

For the first time since 1914, there is a public debate in Congress over the Federal Reserve's power. Never before has a majority of the House of Representatives called for what should always have existed: Congressional scrutiny over the FED's money. Bernanke says that Ron Paul's bill to audit the Federal Reserve is a bill to audit Federal Reserve policy. Yet the bill says nothing about auditing policy. So, what is he talking about?

What they are afraid of is the American people who when they find out what the Fed has been up to will be thrown into a populist outrage.

What has Bernanke panicked is this: the Federal Reserve has bailed out the biggest banks and has let almost 100 little ones die. This is crony capitalism at its most notorious.

The threat is that Congress will discover what should be obvious: the biggest banks last October almost went bankrupt. Bernanke and Paulson admitted this to Congressional leaders. This is how they got the leaders to authorize the Treasury bailout. This is why the FED swapped marketable Treasury debt for unmarketable toxic debt at face value with the biggest banks.

Which banks? The FED refuses to say.

This is the heart of the matter. This is what has Bernanke in a panic. If Congress compels a full audit � a real audit, not a FED-controlled audit � individual members of Congress will discover that the American financial system is a house of cards. A few of them will release the results of the audit to the public. This will include Website publishers, who will go over the audit, line by line. The mainstream media will face being scooped by newsletter writers, so they will try to publish first.

The public will find out which banks are not safe. This is what has Bernanke in panic mode.

The public will pull deposits out of the biggest, least safe banks and open new accounts at banks that look safer. That will bust some very big banks.

There is no way that the FDIC could cover the losses of even one of these giant banks. It is down to $12 billion in assets, mostly T-bills. It would have to come to Congress for the line of credit that Congress has extended: $500 billion.

The banking cartel would face a breakdown. Why? Because the public would finally learn which big banks got how much money, how much Treasury debt for toxic assets, and on what terms.

So it's not just the Fed that is panicked it's their friends at the big banks.

The big bankers know that their banks would be insolvent without Federal Reserve bailouts, Treasury Department bailouts, and smoke-and-mirrors accounting. They know that any light thrown on the system's smoke-and-mirrors accounting will reveal the insolvency of the biggest banks.

The directors of these banks do not want the public to be able to get access to these facts by means of a full-scale audit of the Federal Reserve System. The paper trail, meaning the digital money trail, leads to their banks. This terrifies them. It should.

North concludes with this:

The Federal Reserve has lost a lot of its legitimacy. It has also lost a lot of its secrecy. By opposing the audit, Bernanke is positioning himself as an anti-democratic representative of the Wall Street banks. Of course, this is what every FED chairman has been. But this is the first time since 1914 that any FED chairman (or his equivalent) has had to adopt this positioning in full public view.

This is bad news for the Federal Reserve. When the economy gets worse, as it will, the FED will receive its share of the blame, which is considerable. Bernanke is the primary visible agent of the FED. He will no longer get a free ride. The critics are at long last getting a hearing by the informed public � the people with lots of money deposited in large banks. This is why he has been going on television to present his case. No other FED chairman in history has been forced to do this. This is a sign of the degree of panic in the boardrooms.

The more often Bernanke goes on TV, the more people will think: "Methinks he doth protest too much."

This is a very good thing.