Does the Federal Reserve Manipulate the Market ?

Rep Alan Grayson grills the general council of the Federal Reserve

Alex Jones - The Obama Deception 2009

The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people. The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order.

RON PAUL - What If Americans Knew the Truth ?

...about money, the federal reserve,the war on terror,the war on drugs,religion...

ECONOMIC GRAPHS OF DOOM ???

Via: Financial Times:

Banks and investment banks whose health is crucial to the global financial system should operate under a unified regulatory framework with “appropriate requirements for capital and liquidity”, according to Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Writing in Monday’s Financial Times, Mr Geithner, a key US policymaker throughout the credit crisis and one of the main architects of the rescue of Bear Stearns, says that the US Federal Reserve should play a “central role” in the new regulatory framework, working closely with supervisors in the US and round the world.

“At present the Fed has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap,” Mr Geithner says, in an excerpt of a speech to be delivered today at the Economic Club of New York.

The credit crisis has heightened pressure on US policymakers to consider sweeping changes to a regulatory system for financial institutions which has commercial banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup regulated by the Fed and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers more loosely regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr Geithner called the system “a confusing mix of diffused accountability, regulatory competition and a complex web of rules that create perverse incentives and leave huge opportunities for arbitrage and evasion”.

However, legislation to overhaul US financial regulation is unlikely to start advancing through Congress until next year when the new administration takes office.

In his speech, Mr Geithner will also say the Fed is examining whether to make “permanent” some of the new liquidity facilities put in place during the credit crisis, and called for central banks to establish a “standing network of currency swaps, collateral policies and account arrangements” to bolster liquidity during a future crisis.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Knight, the general manager of the Bank of International Settlements, the Basel-based central banking group, told the FT that the financial system now faces a growing risk of exchange-rate volatility as investors and central banks grapple with the impact of rising commodity prices and other inflationary pressures.

“It is not clear if the rest of the world is going to continue to fund the US current account deficit at current levels of exchange rates,” he said. “The pattern of the exchange rates is subject to considerable uncertainty now.”

The comments are likely to be closely watched by investors and policymakers, since they come at a time of renewed market focus on the outlook for the dollar relative to the euro and other currencies. Last week, Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman, broke with the US central bank’s traditional silence on currency matters to make clear that it does not want any further dollar weakness.

While the dollar rallied on Mr Bernanke’s remarks, it retreated later in the week after European Central bank comments suggested an interest rate rise and as the price of crude oil soared, heightening inflation fears.

“There is a perception that after a long period of quiescent inflation, things are changing,” Mr Knight said. “This is quite visible in terms of commodity prices in energy markets but also in terms of what is happening with other commodities too.”

BONUS GRAPH ON GASOLINE PRICES AND INCOME

TREASURY WANTS TO MAKE THE FED OMNIPOTENT ?

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system.

The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation’s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades.

Democratic lawmakers are all but certain to say the proposal does not go far enough in restricting the kinds of practices that caused the financial crisis. Many of the proposals, like those that would consolidate regulatory agencies, have nothing to do with the turmoil in financial markets. And some of the proposals could actually reduce regulation.

According to a summary provided by the administration, the plan would consolidate an alphabet soup of banking and securities regulators into a powerful trio of overseers responsible for everything from banks and brokerage firms to hedge funds and private equity firms.

While the plan could expose Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds to greater scrutiny, it carefully avoids a call for tighter regulation.

The plan would not rein in practices that have been linked to the housing and mortgage crisis, like packaging risky subprime mortgages into securities carrying the highest ratings.

The plan would give the Fed some authority over Wall Street firms, but only when an investment bank’s practices threatened the entire financial system.

And the plan does not recommend tighter rules over the vast and largely unregulated markets for risk sharing and hedging, like credit default swaps, which are supposed to insure lenders against loss but became a speculative instrument themselves and gave many institutions a false sense of security.

Parts of the plan could reduce the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is charged with maintaining orderly stock and bond markets and protecting investors. The plan would merge the S.E.C. with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates exchange-traded futures for oil, grains, currencies and the like.

The blueprint also suggests several areas where the S.E.C. should take a lighter approach to its oversight. Among them are allowing stock exchanges greater leeway to regulate themselves and streamlining the approval of new products, even allowing automatic approval of securities products that are being traded in foreign markets.

The proposal began last year as an effort by Henry M. Paulson Jr., secretary of the Treasury, to make American financial markets more competitive against overseas markets by modernizing a creaky regulatory system.

His goal was to streamline the different and sometimes clashing rules for commercial banks, savings and loans and nonbank mortgage lenders.

“I am not suggesting that more regulation is the answer, or even that more effective regulation can prevent the periods of financial market stress that seem to occur every 5 to 10 years,” Mr. Paulson will say in a speech on Monday, according to a draft. “I am suggesting that we should and can have a structure that is designed for the world we live in, one that is more flexible.”

Congress would have to approve almost every element of the proposal, and Democratic leaders are already drafting their own bills to impose tougher supervision over Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and the fast-growing market in derivatives like credit default swaps.

But Mr. Paulson’s proposal for the Fed echoes ideas championed by Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Both see the Fed overseeing risk across the entire financial spectrum, but Mr. Frank is likely to favor a stronger Fed role and to subject investment banks to the same rules that commercial banks now must follow, especially for capital reserves.

The Treasury plan would let Fed officials examine the practices and even the internal bookkeeping of brokerage firms, hedge funds, commodity-trading exchanges and any other institution that might pose a risk to the overall financial system.

That would be a significant expansion of the central bank’s regulatory mission.

When Fed officials agreed this month to rescue Bear Stearns, once the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, they pointedly noted that the Fed never had the authority to monitor its financial condition or order it to bolster its protections against a collapse.

In two unprecedented moves, the Fed engineered a marriage between JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns, lending $29 billion to JPMorgan to prevent a Bear bankruptcy and a chain of defaults that might have felled much of the financial system.

For the first time since the 1930s, the Fed also agreed to let investment banks borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from its discount window, an emergency lending program reserved for commercial banks and other depository institutions.

But Mr. Paulson’s proposal would fall well short of the kind of regulation that Democrats have been proposing. Mr. Frank and other senior Democrats have argued that investment banks and other lightly regulated institutions now compete with commercial banks and should be subject to similar regulation, including examiners who regularly pore over their books and quietly demand changes in their practices.

In a recent interview, Mr. Frank said he realized the need for tighter regulation of Wall Street firms after a meeting with Charles O. Prince III, then chairman of Citigroup.

When Mr. Frank asked why Citigroup had kept billions of dollars in “structured investment vehicles” off the firm’s balance sheet, he recalled, Mr. Prince responded that Citigroup, as a bank holding company, would have been at a disadvantage because investment firms can operate with higher debt and lower capital reserves.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has taken a similar stance.

“Commercial banks continue to be supervised closely, and are subject to a host of rules meant to limit systemic risk,” Mr. Schumer wrote in an op-ed article on Friday in The Wall Street Journal. “But many other financial institutions, including investment banks and hedge funds, are regulated lightly, if at all, even though they act in many ways like banks.”

Mr. Paulson’s proposal is likely to provoke bruising turf battles in Congress among agencies and rival industry groups that benefit from the current regulations.

Administration officials acknowledged on Friday that they did not expect the proposal to become law this year, but said they hoped it would help frame a policy debate that would extend well after the elections in November.

In a nod to the debacle in mortgage lending, the administration proposed a Mortgage Origination Commission to evaluate the effectiveness of state governments in regulating mortgage brokers and protecting consumers.

The bulk of the proposal, however, was developed before soaring mortgage defaults set off a much broader credit crisis, and most of the proposals are geared to streamlining regulation.

This plan would consolidate a large number of regulators into roughly three big new agencies.

Bank supervision, now divided among five federal agencies, would be led by a Prudential Financial Regulator, which could send examiners into any bank or depository institution that is protected by either federal deposit insurance or other federal backstops. It would eliminate the distinction between “banks” and “thrift institutions,” which are already indistinguishable to most consumers, and shut down the Office of Thrift Supervision.

Any effort to merge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with the S.E.C. is likely to provoke battles.

Yet another proposal would, for the first time, create a national regulator for insurance companies, an industry that state governments now oversee.

Administration officials argue that a national system would eliminate the inefficiencies of having 50 different state regulators, who have jealously guarded their powers and are likely to fight any federal encroachment.

Arthur Levitt, a former S.E.C. chairman who has long pushed for stronger investor protection, said his first impression of the plan was positive. Even though the S.E.C.’s powers might be reduced, Mr. Levitt said, the plan would create a broader agency to regulate business conduct in all financial services.

“It’s a thoughtful document,” he said. “I’m intrigued by the fact that it puts an emphasis on investor protection, and that it establishes an agency specifically for that purpose, which would operate across all markets. I think that’s a very constructive first step.”

RON PAUL - THE FED IS DESPERATE !

"DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN IN A RING OF FIRE" !

What do you mean we can't export our inflation? or dollars?

Now we have to sell off the USA's collateral?
What collateral?... oh, you mean all the EPA protected federal land?

Well, whose idea was this "fractional reserve" banking system,anyway?
Babylon? like the bible Babylon? woah!

So,remember how the mafia runs a business into the the red, then burns the place down to collect the insurance?
... this is nothing like that so don't worry !

RON PAUL CONFRONTS THE FED ON DOLLAR VALUES

RON PAUL - WHAT IS "STAGFLATION" ?

IT THE 70'S ALL OVER AGAIN !

JIM CRAMER - INVESTIGATE THE FED ???

RON PAUL & JIM CRAMER - THE FEDERAL RESERVE

RON PAUL - HOW TO FIX THE ECONOMY ?

RON PAUL BLASTS THE FED ON DROPPING RATES

LOWERING THE INTEREST RATE ONLY HELPS INVESTMENT BANKERS NOT MOST AMERICANS!
ITS SIMPLE MATH YOU CAN'T IMPROVE THE ECONOMY BY DEVALUING THE CURRENCY !

A MESSAGE FROM RON PAUL

Dear friend,

Our American way of life is under attack. And it is up to us to save it.

The world's elites are busy forming a North American Union. If they succeed, as they did in forming the European Union, the good ol’ USA will only be a memory. We cannot let that happen.

The UN wants to confiscate our firearms and impose a global tax. The UN elites want to control the oceans with the Law of the Sea Treaty. And they want to use our military to police the world.

Our right to own and use property is fading because bureaucrats and special interests are abusing eminent domain.

Our right to educate our children as we choose is under assault. "No Child Left Behind" is seeing to that. And our right to say "no" to forced mental screening of our school-aged children is nearly gone.

The elites gave us a national ID card. They also gave us the most misnamed legislation in history: The Patriot Act. And these same people are pushing to give amnesty to illegal immigrants and erase our national borders.

Record government debt is putting a burden on our children and grandchildren that is shameful.

Yes. Our American way of life is under attack. And it's understandable that many are concerned, even discouraged, about the kind of country our children and grandchildren will inherit.

But we must never let discouragement become surrender.

One reason I am NOT discouraged is because I know I am not fighting alone. Each day I head out I know that you and thousands of other patriotic, freedom-loving Americans are right beside me, standing brave and true for what is good and right.

I need your help now, more than ever, to save the country we love...for the people we love.

My wife Carol and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary early this year. We are proud parents of five children and 18 grandchildren. We love them very much, as I know you love your family.

As a U.S. congressman, I always think about the well-being of my family and of all the families of our great nation when I cast a vote or introduce legislation. I also remember that I have sworn a solemn oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States.

For me, upholding that oath is the first and best way to preserve and protect the blessed American way of life for our children and grandchildren.

And now you know why I'm running for president of the United States.

I ask for your help. Please send your maximum donation today by going to https://www.ronpaul2008.com/donate/ .

Sincerely,

Ron

RON PAUL EXPOSES THE FEDERAL RESERVE !

Via: VideoSift