The Federal Reserve’s Secret Unicorn Factory

Leprosy was a ghastly disease. The ghastliest!

Few people know why, though.

It essentially fries the nervous system until the victim can’t feel pain. So when the leper trips and breaks his ankle, he just gets up and keeps walking on the leg because he can’t tell he’s broken it.

It doesn’t take long until it’s all out of shape and twisted and he’s keeled over and he just keeps going because, oh well, it doesn’t bother him a bit.

That’s why lepers look so awful. When something’s wrong, they have no signals with which to tell them. So nothing ever gets properly taken care of.

Pain is a necessary signaling system for our bodies. It tells us there’s something wrong. That we should retract and take stock and, if necessary, do something else. Pain’s a sign to re-strategize — it’s a sign something’s not working.

It’s a sign if you keep walking on that ankle it’s not going to set or heal right and you’re going to walk like a zombie for the rest of your life.

Unnecessary pain is bad. But necessary pain is not only good… it’s necessary.

This is true for all organ-isms. Whether it be individuals, relationships, organ-izations, nations or economies. Where there’s pain, there’s a signal that something’s not working. It’s a signal to pay attention.

The Fed’s Monetary Leprosy

The Federal Reserve doesn’t allow for the economy to feel necessary pain. It doesn’t allow the economy to signal when something is wrong.

In the Fed’s terms:

When the economy is not showing an “acceptable” level of growth by natural means, “stimulus” substitutes private demand.

I’ll rephrase:

When the workaholic feels tired, ill, or generally down, rather than resting he takes another hit of meth.

The worker thinks the meth will help him work longer hours. He thinks rest is for losers. He’ll sleep when he’s dead, he says.

But what he doesn’t see is how he’s selling out his future self’s health, wealth and teeth for an illusion of short-term advancement.

Figures don’t lie.

Math is the closest thing humans have to objective truth. Math can serve as the great simplifier — whittling down extraordinary complex systems into a few simple numbers we can look at and make incredibly informed decisions.

Alas, in the words of Twain, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

The Federal Reserve’s meddling distorts the market so nobody can figure out what’s up and what’s down. It’s a unicorn factory, creating all sorts of wild things which abhor reality.

The Fed masks any pain with unnatural growth. It injects cells into the system which do not belong. You know what else does that? Cancer.

Cancer does that.

When people are incentivized not to confront reality (the pain), a growth, a tumor, perhaps, arises. And, sooner or later, if it’s not dealt with, the tumor becomes so big and ghoulish it takes over, redirecting the system to serve itself.

The economic tumor a la Fed has a technical name — Cerebral Rectimitus. Colloquially, though, it’s known as “politics.”

And it’s malignant.

It’s politics, silly.

The Fed has many fooled into thinking that, because of its “independence” from the political machine, it isn’t used as a political tool.

Pah! Unicorn thinking to the max.

(Per Wikipedia: The Federal Reserve System has a “unique structure that is both public and private”^[46] and is described as “independent within the government” rather than “independent of government“.^[47])

We suggest those individuals read today’s featured article below from Joe Jarvis of The Daily Bell.

They won’t leave empty-handed.

They’ll either acquire a brand new bridge or see the Light and kill their unicorns.

Read on.

The Fed is Not Political; And I Have a Bridge to Sell You

Joe Jarvis

There is an old saying that one should never talk about politics or religion. I think that is just a way to make sure people don’t talk about anything productive or eye opening.

And I think it is basically the same attitude that makes the New York Times tell us not to “politicize the Federal Reserve.”

Yes, I had to do a bit of a double take there as well.

The article was written by Robert Rubin, the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton. Clinton kept Republican Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and now Rubin is afraid Trump will politicize the Federal Reserve when he replaces Yellen.

Trump may throw a curveball and the powers that be need desperately to preserve the status

“The Federal Reserve System was created by statute in 1913, but the independence of its monetary policy from congressional or presidential influence is not codified by law — and it wasn’t always inviolable. In recent years, so-called reforms have been proposed to subject Fed monetary policy to congressional review, but its independence has so far been preserved.

“For good reason: An independent Federal Reserve led by governors who are committed to pursuing its dual mandate of price stability and full employment, as well as effective regulation — and who make decisions based on facts and analysis — is critically important to our economy, the well-being of the people and the market credibility of Fed policy making.”

Hilarious. Tell me another. Oh, here it is, “I fear there may also be an effort to scapegoat the Fed if (or rather, when) the administration’s unrealistic economic growth estimates fail to materialize.”

It basically sounds like the Fed is Rubin’s religion. In their sacred temple, they make sound economic policy, and sacrifice for the good of humanity, to keep full employment, and stable rates. May the bubbles never burst, and may our economic guardian angels watch over us forever and ever, Amen.

What this really comes down to is factions of the same political beast competing for power. Rubin’s faction has had the power for decades, and they now fear that Trump may instigate a coup.

In a sense, Rubin is right when he talks around the issue of the Fed having too much power. It seems it took Donald Trump being elected President to make those on the left consider that a system is broken if it depends on having good people in power. (Especially since power attracts bad people, and corrupts good people.)

And as for Rubin’s insane claims that the Fed has never been politicized before, Ron Paul had a pretty good response.

The most notorious example of Fed chairmen tailoring monetary policy to fit the demands of a president is Nixon-era Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns. Burns and Nixon may be an extreme example — after all no other president was caught on tape joking with the Fed chair about Fed independence, but every president has tried to influence the Fed with varying degrees of success. For instance, Lyndon Johnson summoned the Fed chair to the White House to berate him for not tailoring monetary policy to support Johnson’s guns and butter policies.

Federal Reserve chairmen have also used their power to shape presidential economic policy. According to Maestro, Bob Woodward’s biography of Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton once told Al Gore that Greenspan was a “man we can deal with,” while Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen claimed the Clinton administration and Greenspan’s Fed had a “gentleman’s agreement” regarding the Fed’s support for the administration’s economic policies.

The Federal Reserve has also worked to influence the legislative branch. In the 1970s, the Fed organized a campaign by major banks and financial institutions to defeat a prior audit bill. The banks and other institutions who worked to keep the Fed’s operations a secret are not only under the Fed’s regulatory jurisdiction, but are some of the major beneficiaries of the current monetary system.

So I am not entirely sure in what fantasy land Rubin is living, but it is likely the same one in which the New York Times wants its readers to be living.

Just like the Fed clearly is a political organization which has always coordinated with (if not controlled) those with political power, The New York Times is just another branch of the state propaganda apparatus. The Times wants to scare people away from supporting an audit of the Federal Reserve and lull people into a false sense of security that the Fed is not only capable but willing, to do what is right in order to keep the economy on track.

But the truth is the Fed does not have the best interests of Americans in mind, and even if it did, they still wouldn’t be able to manipulate the economy for the better.

Reprinted from The Daily Bell.

The post The Federal Reserve’s Secret Unicorn Factory appeared first on Laissez Faire.