United Liberty

What if the Federal Reserve dollar falls – hard? How is the globalist blueprint known as Sustainable Development Agenda 21 designed to make humans into livestock? Why liberty must be understood by this generation of Americans lest it be lost for a very long time.

More Americans, an accelerating percentage of ordinary citizens, have come to understand the nature of “fiat” monetary system – that is money created out of thin air. The contemporary fiat system came to the United States in 1913 with the congressional creation of the privately owned United States Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve legislation violated Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution by the issuance of legal tender and brought once again the influence/control of the globalist banking cartel to the U.S.

Today’s global monetary system was originally authorized by the British Parliament. Its purpose was to form the central bank of England as the Bank of England, which is the equivalent to our Federal Reserve, to control a nation’s money.

“Issuing money” means controlling fiat (phony) money creation through the operation of a printing press or computer entry. This results in the regular increase in the money supply which ultimately expresses itself as price inflation.

Newly issued money is infused into the money supply via the creation of debt. Much of this debt is held by the federal government. More money equals more debt. ‘The harder I work’, says the average American, ‘the deeper in debt the nation becomes.’

Growing debt cedes the ultimate exercise of control to the creditor, particularly as the system breaks down under its own largesse. A “new” system is being designed by the same forces who designed today’s fiat system and who now have America close to the brink of dollar destruction. It is the replacement system that we must be wary of if we are to exercise a wise defense and restoration of freedom.

As you may have heard, Herman Cain is planning on forming an exploratory committee for a presidential run in 2012. I’m not surprised. Cain has always held ambition to hold elected office. He ran for the United States Senate here in Georgia in 2004; losing to now-Senator Johnny Isakson without a runoff.

Many don’t realize that this isn’t the first time Cain, who once served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, has discussed a presidential bid. As Matt Lewis has noted, Cain ran for president in 2000.

Like many conservatives, Cain has used the tea party movement as a platform to build up his name and slam the policies of Barack Obama and Democrats. Unfortunately, the criticism of Obama and friends inside the tea party movement is no longer limited to economic policy.

However, Cain was largely silent during the six years of runaway spending under the Bush Administration and a Republican-controlled Congress. Like most Republicans, he only acknowledged his party’s failings after it was too late to do anything about it.

He backed the Wall Street bailout, or according to Cain, the “recovery plan,” as he called it on his radio show. Cain wrote that nationalizing banks “is not a bad thing.” He even went as far as criticizing opponents of the bailout, calling them “free market purists” and absurdly claiming that no valid criticism had been brought forward.

B.J. Lawson is a candidate for the House of Representatives in North Carolina’s Fourth District. To learn more about his candidacy, please visit www.lawsonforcongress.com.

We’re being treated to legislative bread and circuses with the recently-passed financial “reform” bill. Putting aside the irony of a “Consumer Protection Bureau” being housed in the Federal Reserve, whose shareholders are the largest banks while also being tasked with regulating the largest banks… we’re being distracted by these “reform” efforts in the face of the largest looting operation in American history.

Here’s how it works: in our world of “global ZIRP” (zero interest rate policy), banks get to borrow from the Federal Reserve at essentially zero interest. But instead of making loans to Main Street based upon those borrowings, banks are buying Treasury debt hand over fist to finance our massive deficit spending while pocketing 2-4% interest on the backs of American taxpayers.

Wouldn’t you like the opportunity to borrow at zero and lend at 3% to the federal government? Sure beats working for a living.

Henry Blodget wrote two excellent articles on the racket a few months ago: How to Make the World’s Easiest $1 Billion, and The Fed’s “Exit Plan” is Just Another Secret Gift to Wall Street.

Herein lies a fundamental problem with our financial system: the federal government cannot “regulate” the banks. The federal government needs the banks, especially as our government debt becomes less attractive to foreign lenders.

I particularly enjoyed this non sequitur today in my inbox, from one of my favorite news providers, BusinessInsider.com:

“The G20 has agreed to pursue programs of austerity while also preserving and enhancing the recovery.”

When I clicked on the link, I got the real headline:

“G20 Officially Reveals Its Total Pointlessness.”

Yes, the politicians are stymied. The only good thing going for them is that they are finding lots of occasions to practice their talent for talking out of both sides of their mouth. But the straight-talking intellectual academics aren’t faring much better.

A few blogs ago, I described this slow-motion movie we’re all watching as this recession unfolds. The movie’s climax will approach when the Federal Reserve finds itself in front of a dilemma: They must withdraw central bank assistance to maintain credibility in the U.S. bond and dollar, but when is the right time to begin?

Their problem is that no one seems to know. Bernanke and his colleagues are reportedly hunkered down as I write, trying to figure out how to handle what is looking increasingly like another slowdown, or to be precise the second V in the W. But this is not what they expected to happen. This is not AT ALL what they expected to happen.

The following written by Joshua Fulton. You can check out his blog here.

Chris Dodd, everybody’s favorite hairdo, has introduced a “tough” financial “reform” bill that he claims will “limit the risk [financial institutions] can assume.” Of course, most people with a pulse realize that a 1565 page bill introduced by one of the top recipients of financial industry lobbyist money in Congress probably will do little to ‘reform’ the financial industry in the best interests of the American people. That, however, doesn’t fully capture the perniciousness of this bill.

When we look at it closely, we can see it is one of the most dangerous bills introduced in Congress in years.

Once again, the question of future inflation is boggling the minds of many a financial forecaster. Are we headed for a rise in prices that will carry the Dow up and away, hopefully carrying the rest of us with it, or are we going to suffer the second leg of the W Recession as commercial property and/or the inevitable rise in interest rates hits the skids?

The questions I would pose are quite different. We are already engulfed in a sea of inflated purchasing media that is constantly roosting, taking off, and realighting in its search for new quick profits. Unfortunately, given the current labor market, it won’t even be dipping a little toe in the ordinary person’s paycheck on its way by, at least not anytime soon.

So where is it now, and what is going on? It is where it has gone for the last two years, to wit ten years or more: into speculative investment, biding its time. In America, at least, it isn’t going into production, and it isn’t going into salaries. It’s going into profits and speculative investments, instruments like Greek bonds and credit default swaps so popular with the hedge fund crowd.

This means that the answer to the introductory question is yes, inflation, but be careful how you define it. As I have harangued before, the word is used flippantly to mean at least two things: on the one hand, price increases represented supposedly by the CPI; and on the other: excess purchasing media, the kind that used to cause price increases before the market got savvy, but that now finds itself blowing bubbles while maintaining general prices that should be falling so that the ordinary consumer gets a break. This definition we could differentiate by naming the process “inflating.”

They say that money doesn’t grow on trees. That’s true. It grows in banks.

I’m not talking about compounding interest either. I’m talking about creation of money right out of thin air. It is well known and understood that the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) print money at will. What’s not so well understood is that regular commercial banks essentially do the same thing. To understand this, we have to explore the nature of money, credit, and the modern banking system.

Money can be described in several ways and has a variety of characteristics.We should begin with the Merriam Webster definition: “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment.” In early simple economies, barter was the principle means of exchange. This ultimately evolved to commodity money. Items which had a useful value on their own, are easily transportable, do not lose value or deteriorate, and are reasonably commonplace would serve as commodity money. Over the centuries, metal coins evolved out of being simple commodity money into serving as government issued currency. Generally, the metal coins face value as issued would be equivalent to the metal’s value independently. Of course, governments were notorious for devaluing the coins in a variety of ways.

I recently read an article written by former Fed economist Richard Alford over at Naked Capitalism. He focused his criticism on the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) currently deployed by the Fed under the watch of Chairman Ben Bernanke. There has been increasing noise surrounding ZIRP and more mainstream suggestions that interest rates were too low for too long between 2001 and 2006.

Alford’s article gets into quite a bit of detail, but it is worth a read if you enjoy geeky economics stuff. Mainstream macroeconomists believe that the economy can be explained and managed with mathematical formulas. In fact, the formulas are really quite simple and do not capture the dynamics of the millions of “irrational” actors therein. One favorite is the Taylor rule which suggests a target for the Fed funds rate - the key interest rate set by the central bank. Alford points to a Taylor op-ed which states that rates were too low from 2002-2005.

Bernanke has suggested that rates necessarily had to be low (and must stay low) to fend off the threat of deflation. When analyzing Bernanke’s definition of deflation, however, Alford suggests deflation was never a threat. Thus, interest rates were lower than they “should have been” for no good reason.

Once again, Bernanke is the object of my funny bone. The day is coming soon when his mettle will be tested.

Ben Bernanke is showing himself to be more of a Big-Government politician than a scientist. In his latest speech, he has tried to defend the actions of his predecessors by claiming that their easy-money monetary policy only holds five percent of the responsibility for the high real estate prices that ignited the boom-and-bust bubble that almost broke the back of the global economy.

According to his analysis, 30 percent of the responsibility goes to what he has been calling the “global savings glut.” The other 65 percent, he says, belongs to the inferior standards of the US mortgage market. Therefore, his argument seems to be saying that if we cure the standards we cure the problem.

He attempts to prove his point by demonstrating through charts that other countries had even looser monetary policy than the US, and yet they did not show a worse real estate boom; therefore, he concludes, loose monetary policy does not cause bubbles.

This sounds convincing, coming as it does from the highest-placed economic academician in the land. But his logic is flawed.

There are two problems with his argument. First, you cannot isolate these particular variables as he has done. To do so is the equivalent of saying Michael Phelps eats a lot, and he is not obese, therefore a high-calorie diet does not cause obesity. (Michael Phelps is the Olympic medalist swimmer who purportedly eats around 8,000-10,000 calories a day. A scientist could probably prove that he also spends almost 8,000-10,000 calories a day in his sports activities.)