Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve.

Many people believe that the Federal Reserve is a government-run bank, but that's not true. In reality, it's a private bank that's owned by large banks, giving them control over our money system. This is a big problem because they take our money all the time, claiming it's for the good of the country, but it's really just a way for them to enrich themselves.

The Federal Reserve has given trillions of dollars of government money to private banks, big corporations, foreign countries, and billionaires in the name of stabilizing the economy. However, they haven't given anything to the average citizen. They use a tactic called "Quantitative Easing" to provide money directly to corporations, who then issue stock buybacks to their wealthy shareholders. For example, oil companies made 35 billion dollars in profit in the first quarter of 2022 and are estimated to give $88 billion dollars in stock buybacks to their wealthy shareholders.

Quantitative Easing is supposed to be a temporary policy to inject money into the economy and expand economic activity. However, it's been going on for twenty years, and the money has mostly gone to the wealthy instead of the middle class to support the economy.

Over the past two decades, the Federal Reserve, banks, and big corporations have used "financial engineering" to manipulate data and artificially inflate the value of assets, enriching the top 1% of the population. This money is a house of cards, and clawbacks are no longer enforced, which means that the money can't be taken back from the 1% who have stolen it from the bribe system.

The corporate media often complains about the small amount of money that people got from the government during the COVID pandemic. However, they rarely talk about the trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve gave to Wall Street, which are the rich and powerful people. The corporate media does not want to inform people about the fact that the amount of money given to corporations far exceeds the amount given to the average citizen. When the stock market was crashing in March 2020, the Federal Reserve poured trillions of dollars into Wall Street, buying assets, stocks, bonds, and treasury bills to expand their balance sheet during the coronavirus crisis. This all started in March of 2009 during the Republican Recession when the stock market crashed, which caused the Federal Reserve to take extraordinary actions that had never been taken before. The rich received tons of money and support, far more than working-class people. None of the multi-trillions of dollars given to billionaires has been paid back to the government. However, the corporate media portrays the average person as a "freeloader" for receiving a small amount of assistance to feed their families.

Since the Great Republican Recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve has been conducting "stress tests" on the nation's banks. The purpose of these tests is supposed to determine if the banks have enough capital to continue lending to households and businesses during a severe recession. However, this process is a sham because there is no "stress test" on the Federal Reserve to determine if it is solvent. The main purpose is to allow banks to return hundreds of billions of dollars to investors in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, which eventually comes from the United States Treasury.

The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States, and in many ways, it's the central bank to other government central banks around the world. Central banks favor certain types of economic management that disproportionately benefit some economic sectors at the expense of others, mainly favoring the rich over the poor. They are making political decisions that should not be decided by bankers.

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Talking Points Information

The Fed has been goosing the economy steadily since the Bush Crash of 2008, buying US and corporate bonds with money it creates out of thin air (only the Fed can “print money” like this by simply willing the dollars into existence). By purchasing and holding those bonds over the past 14 years, the Fed has created and then flushed into our economy $8 trillion in liquid cash. This is how the Fed stimulates an economy in crisis: pouring newly-created money into the system with almost all the money going to big corporations and billionaires.