David D'Amato of C4SS brings us play-by-play on the latest Federal Reserve shell game.
In a press release yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced plans to undertake quantitative easing measures, “purchas[ing] … $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month.” Quantitative easing is the sly euphemism used to describe a policy whereby, instead of attempting to pass another highly visible stimulus package through Congress, the central bank purchases the federal government’s debt obligations.
If we didn’t know better, we might speculate that, considering its profligate spending, the Fed has a cache of wealth in a secret vault somewhere, some tangible value to back up its decision. Careful to characterize its latest move as a legitimate treatment for an ailing economy, the many voices of the Fed have stressed that the maneuver is a value-for-value exchange as opposed to a gratuitous handout to the banking/creditor class. While the Fed is paying for something — government Treasury bonds — it is acquiring that something at a price that no one in a market completely free from coercion would ever ante up for such rotten debt.
By diluting the money in our wallets, essentially dividing our dollars into parts and pretending those parts are worth as much as the original bills, the new round of quantitative easing is a veiled tax. Quantitative easing therefore operates to drain the real wealth out of productive society for sake of the banking elite, relieving their books of the debt that only an institution financed by brazen theft would buy; this is the perverse spectacle of the state-created and -backed central bank buying the state’s securities with the state’s fiat currency.
A system that allowed free market banks or credit unions to circulate their own currencies would reestablish the link between money and the things or services it is exchanged for; ratios between competing currencies would, in turn, provide the kind of price information that the state’s coercive system is so perilously lacking.
The Fed is showing the world what anarchists have always understood, that more regulation and state involvement in the marketplace and in banking are jeopardizing rather than protecting the average consumer. The free market, emancipating the working class and shattering privilege, is the lone answer to the corporate morass we’re stuck in today.
Read more at c4ss.org
