In a show of how much our government thinks that serving the financial oligarchy, rather than the citizenry, is its prime duty, the Fed is fighting to stop the court-ordered disclosure of who borrowed money under the Fed’s various lending facilities. The reason I lump the Fed in with “the government” is that the central bank has been serving as an off-balance sheet entity of the Treasury for quite some time. And not only are the Fed and Treasury acting in near lockstep, but there has been no meaningful change in the government stance towards the banksters. Yes, Team Obama makes more of a show of trying to rein them in, but push comes to shove, it’s merely Paulson version 2.0: same content, better packaging.
What is the Fed trying to hide? Because they really don’t want to release that information. Could this have something to do with them also not wanting an outside audit?
And BTW, the Fed has never been audited. Something which is very curious indeed.
I was really hoping Obama would replace Bush’s lap dog, Bernanke, who cosigned much of the incompetence and voodoo (I mean neo-Keynesian) economics that precipitated this debacle. Whatever else you may say about Greenspan (and there is both good and bad to be said), he WAS independent, and he did take the long view. More often, he steered Presidents (who usually don’t know much about economics) rather than the other way around. Bernanke, on the other hand, was a rubber stamp for an economic incompetent who just wanted the crash to come on someone else’s watch. (He missed, but he did delay it several years and make it worse in the process.)
Obama’s continuation of Bush’s economic lunacy is troubling indeed.
I view Greenspan as a master charlatan with extremist political views. Maybe he steered presidents, or maybe they were all in the same car all along. He presided happily over and helped create two massive bubbles that ended by cratering the economy. I doubt history will be kind to him.