Hillary Clinton has a new plan for the Federal Reserve. No, it isn’t an audit. She wants more women and minorities and people who know nothing about banking to be included in the Federal Reserve process.
For those unversed in the vagaries of America’s currency system, the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 in order to help deal with financial panics. The Reserve was charged with acting as a bank of last resort – ensuring that depositors didn’t lose their money in times of panic. The Reserve was also charged with manipulating currency, essentially, in order to “promote sustainable growth, high levels of employment, stability of prices to help preserve the purchasing power of the dollar and moderate long-term interest rates.”
Now, there’s a strong case that the Federal Reserve ought not have the power to work with the Department of the Treasury to inflate or deflate currency through buying and selling of government bonds. Inflation and deflation are political tools when handled by a motivated government. But if you’re going to have a Federal Reserve, it needs to be apolitical, not overtly political.
Hillary Clinton wants the opposite.
The Federal Reserve is headed up by a board of governors comprised of seven members chosen by the President, plus another dozen regional bank presidents across the country. Those regional bank presidents are chosen, as The Washington Post reports, “by their boards of directors, whose occupants are chosen by the banking industry and by the Fed governors in Washington.”
These people at least understand the industry they’re charged with manipulating.
Hillary wants to change all that. According to The Washington Post, Hillary wants to oust bankers from boards of directors and “increase diversity.” Her spokesman, Jesse Ferguson, explained:
The Federal Reserve is a vital institution for our economy and the well-being of our middle class, and the American people should have no doubt that the Fed is serving the public interest. That’s why Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that commonsense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks — are long overdue.
In other words, it’s time to get some people on the Federal Reserve who will increase and decrease the money supply and raise and lower interest rates with political goals in mind. This is scary stuff. A letter recently signed by 11 senators including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as 100 Congresspeople, says that the Federal Reserve should include “the voices of women, African-Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected.”
Right now, according to The Post, “39 percent of directors come from the financial industry, while 11 percent are from community groups, labor organizations or academia.”
Monetary policy is the easiest and most covert way of redistributing wealth and destroying savings, free exchange, and the capitalist system altogether. As John Maynard Keynes, a big government man if ever there was one, wrote:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Now the left wants full-scale control over America’s chief financial institution via social justice takeover. The consequences will be disastrous.