{"id":186546,"date":"2013-12-24T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-25T01:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/24\/things-that-make-me-agree-with-rand-paul-and-make-me-want-to-have-my-head-examined\/"},"modified":"2013-12-24T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-25T01:26:00","slug":"things-that-make-me-agree-with-rand-paul-and-make-me-want-to-have-my-head-examined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/24\/things-that-make-me-agree-with-rand-paul-and-make-me-want-to-have-my-head-examined\/","title":{"rendered":"Things That Make Me Agree with Rand Paul, and Make me Want to Have My Head Examined"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of the founding of the Federal Reserve, PBS had a debate between 2 financial historians over the benefits of the central bank, and rather surprisingly, they both agreed that the Federal Reserve now sees one of its primary roles as supporting stock market prices<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Consuelo Mack\u2019s Wealthtrack<\/i> program on PBS had invited James Grant, Editor and Founder of Grant\u2019s Interest Rate Observer<\/i>, and Richard Sylla, the Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at NYU\u2019s Stern School of Business. The opening scene for the program shows Sylla in a party hat lighting the candles on the Fed\u2019s birthday cake while Grant snuffs them out \u2013 suggesting that Sylla would be making pro-Fed statements while Grant would take the opposing view.<\/span>

<\/span> What happened during the program, however, was that both men made the candid and bold accusation that the Federal Reserve, for the first time in its history, has assigned itself the job of propping up the stock market.<\/span>

<\/span> Grant had this to say: \u201cNew thing \u2013 it is in the business of talking up the stock market\u2026The Fed is manipulating prices, especially on Wall Street.\u201d To another question from Mack, Grant says: \u201cThe Fed has presided over the decay of finance.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> Professor Sylla adds more fuel to the fire, stating: \u201cThe Fed seems to have, I think almost deliberately, is trying to push the stock market up. I\u2019ve watched this stuff for 40, 50 years now and this is the first time in my memory when it seemed to be official U.S. government policy that the stock market goes up. And the Fed likes this because it thinks that when the stock market goes up, people who own stocks feel richer, they\u2019ll go out and spend more money, and the unemployment rate will come down.\u201d You can watch the full program here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is it possible that the Federal Reserve, with its economic wizards and differential equations, doesn\u2019t know that the more it props up the stock market and Wall Street, the more it is undermining Main Street and exacerbating wealth inequality in America?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I see sh%$ like this, and I start to agree with Rand (and Ron) Paul about the need to reign in the Fed.<\/p>\n

The show goes further, and talks about how the rather customary expense ratio of 2% on a 401(K) means that Wall Street ends up with \u2154 of your money.<\/p>\n

It’s why we need to cut back on Wall Street.  It’s like f%$3ing Kudzu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Federal Reserve, PBS had a debate between 2 financial historians over the benefits of the central bank, and rather surprisingly, they both agreed that the Federal Reserve now sees one of its primary roles as supporting stock market prices: Consuelo Mack\u2019s Wealthtrack program on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,973,1064],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-economy","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}