There's some truth here. The Federal Reserve is constituted differently than other National Currency Issuing Banks, in its independance from government scrutiny and supervision, and with the secrecy with which it conducts its business. In most ways it does operate as the Central Bank of the U.S.
It would be more accurate to state that the entire Global Monetarist Financial Trading System is bankrupt. Monetarism is essentially Free Trade in Currency and, along with Free Trade in Commodities, it has destroyed the American Industrial and Financial Systems.. and that of the world.
The Gold Standard is essentially a form of imposing stability in the currency exchange rates of the world, as once enforced by the Bretton Woods Agreement which was dismantled in the early 1970s. It will have to be reestablished if the current economic collapse is to be stemmed but it need not be based on gold.
We will also have to abrogate all Free Trade agreements, and reinstitute the sovereingty of the nation state in tariffs, in asserting its sovereign and proprietary right to issue currency through its own auspices, in establishing available and affordable credit, in national industrial plannning... all this, to stem this economic catastrophe, which will not abate until its instigating policies are repealed.
Where this opinion errs is in blaming 'government' for the problems. Government isn't the problem.. bad government is. What we have seen in the last 30 years is the elimination of government from THE key planning and supervisory role in asserting moral and national imperatives through market oversight, issuance of currency, control of lending, industrial planning and investment, and, ensuring equitable distribution of wealth. In that way this view point reflects the deep seated American distrust of all government. In part that libertarian attitude was responsible for this fiasco in the first place.
We are now being governed by a Global Investment Organism, utterly amoral, greed infested, irrational.. like a drug addict hooked on high voltage short term profit fixes. It is impoverishing the world, and it will lead to social breakdown, revolutions and wars.. if it not replaced.. with something that has worked in the past.
Last edited by coldstream; Dec 26th, 2008 at 10:26 AM..