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View Full Version : NYT Op Ed section. RP throws book at FED




llepard
12-12-2010, 08:23 AM
Front Page of the Week In Review Section, Sunday NYT 12/12/2010

I guess the New York Times now views RP as being newsworthy. Not only that but they put is some pretty provocative quotes. LL


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/weekinreview/12chan.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Begin Article

The Fed? Ron Paul’s Not a Fan.By SEWELL CHANPublished: December 11, 2010

Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.

But Mr. Bernanke will face even more scrutiny in the months to come. On Thursday, House Republican leaders announced that Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the outspoken Republican libertarian who ran for president in 2008, will become the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed. His position on the central bank is captured in the title of his 2009 book, “End the Fed” (Grand Central Publishing).

Here’s some of what he wrote:

The Beginning of the End

“The day the Fed came into being in 1913 may have been the beginning of the end, but the powers it obtained and the mischief it caused took a long time to become a serious issue and a concern for average Americans.”

The Gold Standard

“Whenever I talk of a gold standard, there are always people ready to accuse me of having some obsession or fixation. Fetish is a word thrown around. In fact, I’m only observing reality: the idea of sound money in most of human history has been bound up with gold money.”

A Full-Time Counterfeiting Operation

On Mr. Bernanke: “There is something fishy about the head of the world’s most powerful government bureaucracy, one that is involved in a full-time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels, and the world’s most powerful central planner, who sets the price of money worldwide, proclaiming the glories of capitalism.”

New Money Out of Thin Air

“Only the Federal Reserve can inflate the currency, creating new money and credit out of thin air, in secrecy, without oversight or supervision. Inflation facilitates deficits, needless wars and excessive welfare spending.”

Fed Chairmen He Has Known

“Being in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1908s and serving on the House Banking Committee, I met and got to question several Federal Reserve chairmen: Arthur Burns, G. William Miller and Paul Volcker. Of the three, I had the most interaction with Volcker. He was more personable and smarter than the others, including the more recent board chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.”

Low Interest Rates

“Artificially low interest rates are achieved by inflating the money supply, and they penalize the thrifty and cheat those who save. They promote consumption and borrowing over savings and investing. Manipulating interest rates is an immoral act. It’s economically destructive.”

The Bailouts

“Today, there is no principled opposition to the corporate bailouts and the Fed’s trillions of dollars of new credit and the takeover of insurance, mortgages, medical care, banks and the auto industry. The arguments have only been over amounts, financial vehicles, and which political group gets to wield the economic power. If there is no moral argument against the economic takeover of America, there will be no resistance to the dictator who rules over our lives with an iron fist.”

The Obama Legacy

“For the same reason a disease cannot be cured by more of the germ that caused it, the inflation and debt accumulation of the Obama years will not inflate our way out of it. This depression will likely last and last.”

Ethek
12-12-2010, 09:00 AM
Wow, I am impressed. I think the Feds days are number. We face the inevitability of a destroyed currency as payoff for an unsustainable debt to GDP ratio and systemic rot that has been facilitated by Fed policy.


I'm glad that Ron is finally being looked too as an arbiter of where we went wrong instead of being grouped in with the current class of politician.

Bruno
12-12-2010, 11:46 AM
bump

MRoCkEd
12-12-2010, 11:51 AM
That's great! Thanks for sharing Larry.

sailingaway
12-12-2010, 11:54 AM
Thanks! I saw this on the internet yesterday, but had no idea it was featured so prominantly on the print edition!

belian78
12-12-2010, 12:11 PM
This attention the FED is getting is both good and bad in that, ending the FED's reign is a great thing. But I see it as paving the way for the IMF and the world bank to take its place on a global scale. That fight I fear would be almost unwinnable, its hard enough educating Americans let alone citizens of other countries.