Money supply, the stimulus & where is the inflation?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By Midwesterner

Samizdata.net

This is a quick thumbnail of money supply for those of you having trouble finding understanding in the tsunami of Keynesian Kool-Aid coming from our ‘betters’.

On October 3rd of 2008, Republicrats and Democans responded to the failure of Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, incipient collapse of AIG Insurance, threatened insolvency of other major financial institutions, and general panic in the financial community, by passing Public Law 110-343. This law contained two basic sections. The most infamous brought us the first of the ‘TARP-ulus‘ genre. But a very important offsetting function was contained in another place in that same law that is known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. Way down in the fine print, it authorized the Federal Reserve Bank to begin immediately paying banks to not loan out money. That was not their exact choice of words. In fact, read Section 128 where they did it and it is almost impossible to tell what exactly they were doing.

Three days later on October 6th of 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank announced it would begin paying banks to not lend money. Again, not their exact choice of words.

Within less than a month the Federal Reserve Bank began discreetly ‘monetizing’ by purchasing Fannie and Freddie debt.

By March of 2009, attempts at discretion fell by the wayside and the Federal Reserve began buying US Treasurys outright. Put simply this means that the Federal Reserve began ‘printing’ money and giving it to the United States Treasury to spend.

During this period of time (from September 2008 through current) the St Louis Adjusted Monetary Base went up by approximately 1 trillion dollars.

Presenting Western District Of North Carolina Case 10-cv-200…fighting the FED~WHOOP!!

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Bankers Destroy Global Economy by Design to Consolidate Power…”HUGE” as a mentor would say…loll;)

New transfers of wealth from middle class go directly to French and German banks

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, May 10, 2010

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.

“The Federal Reserve late Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent,” reports the Associated Press.

“The Fed’s action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis under which dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of dollar funding to prevent the European crisis from spreading further.”

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.”

To rob a country, own a bank….loll

TheRealNews — March 19, 2010 — William Black, author of “Best way to rob a bank is to own one” talks about deliberate fraud on Wall St.

Bernanke asks for more control in new legislation…arghhhhh

The head of the US Federal Reserve has partially opposed president Barack Obama‘s new rules to regulate financial firms.

Legislation unveiled earlier this week by the Obama administration suggested that the central bank would supervise only the biggest banks in the event of a possible failure.

The Federal Reserve would be limited to supervising banks with more than $US50 billion in assets.

Because the role of the US Federal Reserve is at the heart of the proposed legislation, the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has come out to say he wants more control over smaller banks as well.

Mr Bernanke, who during the financial crisis was accused of not seeing it coming, warned that there needs to be a change in culture and structure in all financial institutions to make sure everyone does a better job.

Speaking to the House Financial Services Committee in Washington, he responded to questions about the Fed’s poor record in forecasting the global financial crisis by saying: “So there were mistakes and problems throughout the system. Other regulators and the Federal Reserve, private sector and even Congress made mistakes in this crisis. We have been doing a lot of soul searching and a lot of changes.”

Panic at the Fed or Back to Normalcy?

by F. William Engdahl

The decision of the US Federal Reserve to raise its key interest rate was definitely not a sign of confidence in the US economic recovery or a signal that Fed policy is slowly returning to normal as claimed. It was rather a signal of panic over the weakness in US Government bond markets, the heart of the dollar financial system.

Financial markets have reacted with jubilation, by buying dollars and selling Euros, at the decision by the Fed to raise rates for the first time since 2006 for its so-called Discount Rate, going from 0.5% to 0.75%. The Discount Rate is the interest rate charged for banks to borrow from the central bank. At the same time the Fed left its more important short-term Fed Funds rate unchanged and historically low — between 0.0% and 0.25%. In its official statement the Board of Governors said the rate move was intended to push private banks back into the private inter-bank borrowing market and away from reliance on Federal Reserve subsidized money which had been provided since the financial crisis began in August 2007.

Week ending Feb 20…

GLOBAL GLASS ONION

by rjs

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Update: Week Of February 18 – New Records In Total Assets And Excess Reserves - The Federal Reserve’s balance just hit another record high, at $2.29 trillion, jumping by a whopping $54 billion sequentially (the biggest weekly increase since mid-November).

• Securities held outright: $1,967 billion (an increase of $60.9 billion MoM, resulting from $56 billion increase in MBS and $5 nillion in Agency Debt), or a huge $53.6 billion increase sequentially. The fed is now 95% complete with its purchases of MBS, and 96% complete with purchases of Agencies. The Fed has completed $167.2 billion of its $175 billion agency debt purchase program through February 17. The Fed’s MBS total is now $1.188 trillion, and by the end of the first quarter of 2010, the Fed will have purchased $1.25 trillion.
• Net borrowings: $127 billion. The monetary base increased by $50 billion in the past fortnight to $2.06 trillion. The ratio of total assets to Monetary Base remained constant at 1.08x, elevated from the historical ratio of 1.00x.
• Float, liquidity swaps, Maiden Lane and other assets: $194 billion. The CPFF program was at $7.7 billion.  FX liquidity swaps are now non-existent.

Fed: we need to shrink our balance sheet, but how? – The Federal Open Market Committee released the minutes of the Jan 26-27 session on Wednesday. The meeting minutes revealed disagreement — or at the very least, debate — over the nature and timing of any moves to reduce the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet. …staff noted that the Committee might want to address both the eventual size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and its composition. Policymakers were unanimous in the view that it will be appropriate to shrink the supply of reserve balances and the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet substantially over time. Moreover, they agreed that it will eventually be appropriate for the System Open Market Account to return to holding only securities issued by the U.S. Treasury, as it did before the financial crisis. Several thought the Federal Reserve should hold, eventually, a portfolio composed largely of shorter-term Treasury securities…

Bernanke on the Fed’s balance sheet - (charts) Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke last week released a statement of how the Fed intends to manage its bloated balance sheet over the next few years. Here I offer my interpretation of what his plan involves. Bernanke drew a distinction between three different categories of assets that the Federal Reserve has held on its balance sheet. The first involve extension of short-term emergency credit to financial institutions: This lending came in the form of a wide variety of new facilities, which summed to almost $1.6 trillion by the end of 2008, but are now almost entirely wound down or phased out, as Bernanke observed:

The Economy–There is no magic wand!….

From Uncommon Sense

@davegj

Today’s labor department job report shows initial claims for unemployment benefits increased 31,000 to 473,000. There are now approximately 14,577,800 officially unemployed Americans. That is almost 9 million jobs lost since mid 2007.

Further aggravating the situation, the Producer Price Index for Finished Goods rose 1.4% in January. This increase followed a 0.4% increase in December and a 1.5% increase in November. The index for finished goods excluding foods and energy rose 0.3 percent in January. This is a meaningless number as we all require both food and energy. The bad news is about 75% of the increase last month was due to a 5.1% jump on food and energy goods. Prices for finished goods moved up 4.6 percent for the 12 months ended January 2010, their third consecutive 12-month increase.

Here is your warning sign; the 1.4% increase in January could easily translate into a 10+% inflation rate if the trend continues. Unless this is an anomaly we could be on pace for a significant inflation ramp. All the rescue efforts by the Federal Reserve has set the stage for this inflation, so now the Fed is going to have some decisions to make at its next meeting to try to stop it. This is why Bernanke has been saying we’re probably going to have to raise rates soon.

We have dug ourselves a very deep hole. China is no longer buying our treasury bonds and they sold off many that they had. Japan is now the biggest foreign holder of U.S. debt. Now the Federal Reserve holds the biggest share of our total debt, over $5 trillion. With our AAA credit rating at risk, the next step will be to raise the interest paid on our treasury bonds to get new investors. Do you see where this is going? It is a vicious circle. So now the Fed will drive up interest rates to try to stop the inflation and reduce the money supply which will ultimately kill economic growth.

Remember both Bush and Obama administrations said, we must spend to fix the economy. We were told that printing money, borrowing money and spending money would stimulate the economy. We were told not to worry about inflation. Now all of a sudden inflation is barreling down the road at us. We’re repeating the mistakes of many European nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. all of whom are currently in deep shit! Keynesian Economics do not work!

Wake up, America! It is time to face the truth. The only way out of the mess we are in is to cut – spending and taxes – a lot! We have built a model that is unsustainable. We have to come to grips with the idea that big government is not the answer – it is the problem. I am not just talking about the federal government either. The federal government will have to reduce its’ services to only those which are essential – national defense, infra structure and basic services. Social programs and luxury pork barrel spending must be eliminated. State governments must get smaller too. States need to narrow their focus to the basic services they should provide. We are going to have to rely on communities to pull together and help their own. People are going to have to learn to fend for themselves. Everyone is going to have to sacrifice to fix this problem. Each citizen must be allowed to keep as much as possible so they can reinvest in their savings, communities and build business that will restart the economy. This is the only sane road back to prosperity. The alternatives involve deals with the devil which will lead us to a loss of sovereignty, a world government or some form of socialistic government where we can all live together as peasants.

Restore the Republic, Reject the Agenda of the Progressive Left, Eliminate Big Government! This is the only answer.

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” – Ronald Reagan

“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.” – Ronald Reagan

Central Banking Doesn’t Work – Just Ask the Fed!

By Thomas Mullen

http://thomasmullen.blogspot.com

It is still a tiny minority who understand that central banking is a collectivist institution that is completely hostile to liberty. It is, by definition, an instrument of theft that purports to stabilize economic conditions for the collective by controlling the supply of money and credit. The fact that its only means to do so is to steal from savers to finance well-connected borrowers is a seldom-mentioned detail. That people only use the central bank’s currency because they are forced to do so by legal tender laws is spoken of even less. In this late stage of the Age of Government, the rights to liberty and property are expendable as our rulers “get the work of the American people done.”

Hopefully, the question of whether there should be a Federal Reserve will be on the table soon. However, once one concedes the existence of the Fed, there is a further question to ask: Can it do what it purports to do?