Fed supporting European welfare state (bumped)

Liquidity swaps, my ass.

In a statement on its website, the U.S. Federal Reserve said “In response to the re-emergence of strains in U.S. dollar short-term funding markets in Europe, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank are announcing the re-establishment of temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap facilities. These facilities are designed to help improve liquidity conditions in U.S. dollar funding markets and to prevent the spread of strains to other markets and financial centers. The Bank of Japan will be considering similar measures soon. Central banks will continue to work together closely as needed to address pressures in funding markets.”

How long can we support this nonsense?

Support Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed.

Outrageous Update: Ron Paul’s “audit the fed bill” compromised in Senate.

More specifically, Paul’s language (passed by the House) to audit the Federal Reserve has been stripped from the Sanders Amendment to the Senate financial reform bill. Instead, the Sanders Amendment now contains softer compromise language that exempts monetary policy decisions, discount window operations, and agreements with foreign central banks from Government Accounting Office (“GAO”) audit.

This is of particular concern when several countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain are seeking IMF help in the midst of their financial crises, because American taxpayers provide fully 17% of all IMF funding.

“Taxpayers are weary of bailing out privileged banks and corporations in the US, and we certainly cannot afford to bail out entire countries. The possibility of this happening behind a veil of Federal Reserve secrecy is not acceptable,” stated Congressman Paul. “This compromise language represents a huge missed opportunity by Congress to finally make the Fed accountable for trillions of taxpayer dollars it administers. Full transparency, via a full GAO audit, is the only acceptable option. However, I am grateful to Senator Vitter for offering the original full audit language in an alternative amendment to the bill.”

The Fed is arguably the most powerful institution in the United States. It operates in secret, with taxpayer money, beholden to no political authority.

The language was added to the amendment soon after the market crash. Coincidence? Remember, The Fed and Treasury threatened Congress with martial law during negotiation over the bailouts.

Was the crash a manufactured event to prevent a full audit of the Fed? It looks like it. Scott Creighton has the scoop.

The market didn’t crash by a “glitch” and it wasn’t the European Union or Greek riots either… it was terrorism.  It was a message: Don’t Fuck With Us. Congress got the message and acted accordingly.

The banking oligarchs sent a clear and unmistakable message that they could drop this nation’s economy into the toilet at any time they wished and if congress thought for a minute that they really ran America, they had better rethink that position.

That’s what happened yesterday.

It isn’t a “coincidence” that the super-computer “glitch” happened a few hours before that senate vote and just a while before the White House had a chat with Sanders about his Audit the Fed bill. It was financial terrorism, pure and simple.

Related: Jim Rogers says stock decline is just the beginning.

Update: Dow futures up over 250. If you don’t follow the markets, that’s just huge. Truly massive. Is the Plunge Protection Team already at work? Fixing things after they got what they wanted from Congress? The PPT usually take huge position in futures to swing the current markets in the “right” direction. That’s how price fixing works in America.

Update: American Taxpayers Looted To Bail Out The Euro.

American taxpayers have been freshly liberated of hundreds of billions more dollars as part of the IMF’s new bailout package which is principally going straight to European banks, in addition to the Federal Reserve program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe, in a move that represents little more than a desperate effort to save the Euro and rescue the credibility of economic global governance [...]

As we reported last time this program was enacted, the Federal Reserve refused to say which foreign banks had received an estimated half a trillion dollars in credit swaps. The program is unconstitutional under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution which states, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”

In addition to the credit swap program being re-enacted, the IMF portion of a separate European bailout package amounts to around $287 billion dollars. Since American taxpayers represent around 20 per cent of IMF funding, they will fork out something in the region of $57 billion dollars which which primarily go straight to French and German banks, not to mention the billions more in transfers of wealth that will occur through the Fed’s credit swap program.