Uncommon Sense: Eat All You Want

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No one needs too big to fail as long as Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are willing to give the banks half a trillion dollars a year ad infinitum — just the latest installment of the grandest grand larceny in history.

The biggest banks at the time of the market crash in the fall of 2008 are much bigger now, thanks to their friends and collaborators in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Reserve.  And much less obliged or inclined to act responsibly, thanks to an endless flow of cheap money at zero interest.  “Eat all you want,” Ben tells them.  “We’ll make more.”

But that’s why the Federal Reserve was created in the first place, way back in 1913. It was created to protect and promote the interests of the biggest banks and bankers, plain and simple, and to provide them with a bottomless reserve of public dollars to fund and protect them from the failures of their own high-risk capers.  It was and remains -- a century later -- our purest example of socialism for the wealthy.

Contrary to all the talking heads on TV, the Federal Reserve was never created to stabilize the market.  Indeed, quite the opposite: The greatest transfers of additional wealth to the already wealthy always occur at moments of greatest market chaos and panic. If anything, the Federal reserve destabilizes the market by promoting and funding risky behavior by the biggest banks.

Too big to fail is not the obvious consequence of our failure to plan.  Too big to fail is the plan.

And it’s perfect.  The 21st-century confluence of digital scale and 24/7 news provides the perfect cover for the perfect plan.  The numbers -- like the institutions they support and promote  -- are simply too big to fail, and far too big to resolve after any crash.

Per Marshall McLuhan’s observation half a century ago, our tools and our media have begun to operate in reverse.  “We shape our tools,” he said, “and thereafter, our tools shape us.”

True enough, rather than reveal and enlighten, they obfuscate and confuse.  Rather than more accountability, we have less -- much less.  The media, once perceived as the guardians of truth, have turned against us.  Now they guard the foxes, while the foxes raid the chick coup.

No one in here but us chickens.  Good thing, because all that’s gonna be left after Ben Bernanke and his cronies in Washington and big media get through with us is chicken feed.

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2 comments on "Uncommon Sense: Eat All You Want".

1. Jason Pratt from Kenshoo
   

   commented on: September 20, 2012 at 9:42 a.m.
   Nice post Jeff, I've been anti-Fed for 25 years and it's great to see this kind of stuff starting to pop up on Mediapost and other mainstream channels! End the Fed! :)
2. Domenico Tassone from Viewthrough Measurement Consortium
   

   commented on: September 22, 2012 at 3:56 p.m.
   Agreed.

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