Just for the record, the Federal Reserve was created in order to save the big New York banks from their greed-driven mistakes, and that is the Fed’s principal activity. In recent decades the Fed has gone beyond merely saving the big banks from their mistakes to helping the big ones concentrate more banking into their hands. The Fed causes banking crises and then provides funds for the big banks to absorb the troubled regional banks. The Fed’s current policy of raising interest rates after a decade of negative interest rates has the entire banking system insolvent. This resulted in runs on the banks, which the Fed did not save by expanding reserves, instead permitting failure and acquisition.
It goes without saying the Federal Reserve has the sole responsibility for all inflation, depression, and recession since its creation. Until the Fed’s creation, the purchasing power of the US dollar was essentially constant over massive periods of time. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve (1913), today’s dollar is a small fraction of the value of a dollar in 1912.
Milton Friedman and Anna Swartz in their Monetary History of the United States proved conclusively that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression of the 1930s by allowing the money supply to contract. In fact, it was the Fed that was responsible for the ability of President Franklin D. Rosevelt, a destroyer of American liberty, to use the Great Depression to coerce the US Supreme Court with threats of packing the court with his stooges and to force the US Congress to delegate legislative authority to new executive branch regulatory agencies.
The Federal Reserve in the past and currently fights inflation by fighting employment and by reducing output. This is because the Fed only has a demand model. The incompetent Fed is incapable of realizing that by fighting employment and output, the Fed is reducing supply, thus rising prices.
The Fed’s high interest rates only serve one purpose–bank insolvency, the result of which is more concentration in the hands of the Big Banks. The Federal Reserve chairman Powell recently said that inflation was caused by a strong labor market driving demand and that more interest rate hikes would be necessary. The stupidity of this position is incomprehensible. People working and earning money by providing goods and services is inflationary! Amazing stupidity.
What the Fed is doing is frustrating the lives of people who want to sell and buy homes, frustrating businesses who need loans to finance inventories, frustrating investors by driving down the value of their financial instruments. No good purpose is being served. It is amazing that Americans still tolerate an institution that seeks to make them unemployed, to prevent them from selling and buying homes, that drives up prices by driving up the cost of borrowing.
