Sunday, November 17, 2013

The Federal Reserve and Our Future

Your future, my future, and our children's future are in the hands of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank.  The Fed under Alan Greenspan created the housing bubble that burst in 2008.  Now Ben Bernanke is continuing the zero interest policy of Greenspan and creating a stock bubble.  If this bubble continues to inflate and then burst, the Fed has no ammunition to combat the crash.  It is already pushing interest rates to zero.  It is already doing Quantitative Easing (QE). If we have a huge stock market crash, the Federal Reserve will freeze like a deer in the headlights.  It will feel locked into the zero interest rate and QE.  The zero percent rate is hurting the savings and retirement nest-eggs of the American people.  We already have a generation of young people who have never seen interest paid on savings.  This has to stop.

We need to have both the zero interest rate policy and the Quantitative Easing policy reversed.  Both policies only enrich the Wall Street banks who use these programs to invest in other countries.  These policies do not help you and me, they hurt us.  And if we end up in another great depression, these policies might ruin our children's lives.  America caused the last Great Depression, which spread throughout the world in much the same way as our 2008 banking crisis spread throughout the world.  The last Great Depression brought down governments in Germany, Japan, and Italy and led to a world war with millions of deaths.  The Federal Reserve is playing with fire, it can cause another world wide Great Depression. In the same way we had a World War II we can have a Great Depression II.

Ben Bernanke is leaving the Fed in a mess he helped make.  We need a new Federal Reserve chairman who believes it is time to change course.  The President's nominee, Janet Yellen, wants to stay the course.  She could bring us all to ruin. I am emailing my senators and asking them to vote no to Janet Yellen.  I am suggesting they ask the President to nominate someone like Richard Fisher, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.  On CNBC (Nov. 12, 2013) he said that quantitative easing cannot continue forever:  http://www.cnbc.com/id/101189233  This is the kind of leadership we need.

The Senate turned down Larry Summers.  It is time to turn down Janet Yellen.  Please join me in emailing our senators.

Robert

PS: in Texas you can reach your Senators thusly:
Senator John Cornyn
http://www.cornyn.senate.gov/public/
Senator Ted Cruz
http://www.cruz.senate.gov/

More on the low interest rate policy:  You can Google "Giving Credit to the Rich" by Matthias Rieker, Wall Street Journal (Saturday December 7, page B10) to see an example of how a rich investor could borrow $5 Million at such a low interest rate that it was easy to turn it into a profit.  The low interest rates are a gift to the rich, while the low rates destroy the returns the middle-class needs for its pensions.