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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Venkie who wrote (34012)	3/19/2001 4:50:49 PM
From: Dave	Respond to of 65232

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, was founded by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. Or so they would have you believe. The Federal Reserve is NOT a government entity, although it was formed by an act of congress. The Fed's structure has been kept curiously secret. The official word on federalreserve.gov, for instance, is curiously silent about the fact that the Fed is privately owned, and that it pays ZERO income tax on the hundreds of billions of dollars that it earns on our nation's debt, while being in control of both the interest rate and, indirectly through its influence, the size of that debt. Today the Federal Reserve's duties fall into four general areas: (1) conducting the nation's monetary policy; (2) supervising and regulating banking institutions and protecting the credit rights of consumers; (3) maintaining the stability of the financial system; and (4) providing certain financial services to the U.S. government, the public, financial institutions, and foreign official institutions. As far as "maintaining the stability of the financial system," the Federal Reserve money-printing frenzies arguably were the CAUSES both of the instability that led to the Great Depression and of the greatest stock mania in American history, the Internet Bubble, which is now leading us into Recession. And the Fed profited enormously during both bubbles, keeping interest rates high well into the peaks. Cynically, Dave