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Fed's artificial crises

The ascendance of finance in recent decades has oriented understanding of ‘the economy’ toward financial terms and policies. The Federal Reserve at the heart of ‘monetary’ policy in the U.S. is a public- private consortium run by bankers in the interests of Wall Street. The history of Fed policies in the modern era, from the end of WWII to the present, is of engineering periodic recessions to protect bank ‘assets’ from depreciation through inflation.”

When considered in historical context Mr. Volcker’s actions were at the vanguard of the corporate-capitalist coup that goes far in explaining present circumstance.”

That Fed Chair Volcker was appointed by Democrat President Jimmy Carter in the midst of broad moves to ‘de-regulate’ the U.S. economy and the wholesale abandonment of the Keynesian policies that had guided the U.S. since the Great Depression is more than an accident of history. The epic that followed, finance capitalism, is still under way and it represents a series of manufactured crises in support of a financial plutocracy."

"Mr. Volcker was a former banker and the confluence of circumstances that contributed to public acceptance of barely plausible explanations of the events of the 1970s, the roots-genesis of current circumstance, were contrived and sold with the goals of breaking organized labor and creating-recreating the system of economic expropriation through finance that preceded the Great Depression."

"The first ‘tool’ used was the sequential energy ‘crises’ that began with multi-national oil companies holding oil supplies offshore under the misdirection that an ‘Arab oil embargo’ was the cause of suddenly reduced energy supply. The Iranian Revolution later in the decade was a real but geopolitical, not economic, explanation of energy shortages. The OPEC ‘cartel’ members initially in favor of withholding oil from the U.S., Iran and Venezuela, were supporting U.S. geopolitical interests in the early-mid 1970s. (Oil prices have international consequence). The engineered energy ‘crises’ did cause a rise in ‘inflation,’ but the term is wholly misleading as economic explanation.”

By raising interest rates Mr. Volcker attracted international capital chasing high yields on U.S. assets and raised the value of the U.S. dollar. In conjunction with sequential energy ‘crises’ Mr. Volcker effectively killed the industrial economy by making U.S. goods more expensive overseas. The massive industrial unemployment that resulted took place at the precise time of pivot toward financialization of ‘the economy.’"

"The misdirection put forward then and now was that factories were closing because U.S. labor was too expensive and that U.S. factories were no longer ‘competitive.’ To be clear, the currency exchange rate determined the ‘price’ of U.S. labor relative to overseas labor and this is the ‘price’ that was dramatically raised by Mr. Volcker. Upon Ronald Reagan’s election the process of financializing the economy was moved further forward through Mr. Reagan’s appointment of ex-Merrill Lynch banker Don Regan as Secretary of the Treasury.”

The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ unemployment is a dim hoax designed to convince workers who are being screwed that it is ‘nature’ doing the screwing when it is specific industrialists and financiers who are doing it and particular economists who are mystifying the process.”

And by putting forward discussion of ‘inflation’ framed as a relationship between ‘real’ prices and employment the mainstream has supported the banker economics of the Federal Reserve in regularly and needlessly increasing unemployment and it has directed attention away from the role of bank money, leverage and financial asset price inflation in the massive concentration of ‘wealth’ that has taken place since the 1970s.”

In other words, radical economic redistribution schemes are not only feasible, we’ve seen one of the greatest demonstrations of radical redistribution in human history over the last thirty or so years. Rarely in human history have so few ‘owned’ so much. And the Federal Reserve has been at the heart of that ‘success’ story.”

Full article and graphs:


Related:

... if more money were going to the market, then they would lose much of their value and we would lose profits because we are the ones who print money! That's why we invented inflation, to keep governments in fear and directing money back to us through the so-called Quantitative Easing Policies. [...] When money start to spread in the society 'above acceptable limits', we create financial crises to take them back. We dictate governments to take measures and apply austerity policies directing money back to us. We keep money valuable to everyone and secure our profits.”

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