How much power do the banks have?

ASU2003 · Mar 10, 2013

This video looks at a history of money and banking in the US and the world. How recessions can be caused, and how wars and assassinations took place to get their way and keep their power. It is pretty shocking to learn what happened from the 1760's-1913 in this country with regards to how the banks were run and money was created. While the topic might be 'boring', it effects everything in the world.

Should the government be the ones to print money or create digital money without debt, not the Federal Reserve? What chance do we have of the current two party system actually spending money wisely? Would the powerful wealthy people use wedge issues or start wars in order to reclaim their control in this day and age? What would happen to the credit industry that millions of people count on because they don't want to save money and have cash/debit for each transaction? What will happen if you will need to save much more money to be able to afford a house? Would inflation rise too much if the government would produce interest free money without debt and pay off it's national debt?

Then you look around the world and see that virtually every country has had a recession or money problem in it's history, or is too poor to matter. They will try and sell their natural resources to pay back loans and such, but it only goes so far. How do you deal with this problem?

rogue49 · Mar 12, 2013

So many questions...

And sorry, I don't have enough answers.
Personally, I like the idea of the Federal Reserve and it's distinction from the rest of the government.

Strangely, enough...money is an illusion, but it is not at the same time.
I don't think the Fed has too much power, but I do think the corporate banks have too much capacity for power.
See, the Fed serves the nation...the corporate banks serve themselves.

Sorry, I don't mind regulation on the banks...Why? Because they have tons of implicit power.
Just because of their ability to claim money in accounts to provide loans,
then through those loans based on that, make money from the interest...or take possession of people's homes & cars...
or levy suits against citizens & other businesses.

So they base their whole power on the illusion of funds... (they are only required to have a % of the whole to do business)
Then they turn around and say to us, that we have to have money in our accounts to write checks
and if that money doesn't exist when it comes...then we're responsible for it.
I wish I could do business on just a % in my accounts like they do.

And they have more than enough money...and power...and resources...and people to handle those regulations.
And we've directly seen what happens when they don't have it.
They undermine themselves and the whole economy.
Not local economy, not just national economy...but the whole friggin' global economy.

So put them under tight rein.
The Fed, again...it serves the nation...so I'm not worried about it.
The Big Banks...watch those suckers like a hawk. Because they are in it for themselves.

Now, if you can tell me about this twisted scenario below and how it's going to play out...you're much better than me.
Thankfully, I think the US has some rising good advantages that will allow them to get out of their mess.
Returning manufacturing, new tech, services industry, new natural resources, fading wars...and the rest of the world valuing our currency.
All of which help...like me getting more outside gigs for more income and past obligations now gone to be able to clean up my own house.
It's a similar scenario...
But, America got lucky...circumstances were in their favor, it wasn't by skill or intent.

However, I do think the Fed is pushing the 0% rate for too long.
They should bring it up a tick, by .25%...bit by bit, at least until they get to 1%...then slowly to 2%
It would show stability and confidence in the nation...plus it would give them back "bullets" in case of emergency, right now they're out.
I think the banks, businesses and people can handle a small uptick now.

Bernanke Provokes Mystery Over Fed Stimulus Exit
By Caroline Salas Gage and Joshua Zumbrun - Mar 11, 2013

When Ben S. Bernanke asserted last month that the Federal Reserve doesn’t ever have to sell assets, he raised questions about how the central bank can withdraw its record monetary stimulus without stoking inflation.

The Fed may decide to hold the bonds on its balance sheet to maturity as part of a review of the exit strategy Bernanke expects will be done “sometime soon,” he told lawmakers in Washington on Feb. 27. This would help address concerns that dumping assets on the market will lead to a rapid rise in borrowing costs. It also allows the Fed to avoid realizing losses on its bond holdings as interest rates climb.

Removing asset sales from the exit plan Fed officials agreed to in June 2011 means the central bank would stop prices from accelerating by relying primarily on its ability to pay interest on the cash it holds for banks. Given that the Fed’s total assets have reached an unprecedented level of more than $3 trillion, leaving them untouched when the economy picks up may stoke inflation, according to Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Plc in New York.

“If the Fed doesn’t withdraw quickly enough, there’s a risk of overshooting,” Maki said. “If the Fed gets rates back to a typical level and the economy is back to what’s regarded as normal, does having an expanded balance sheet have a notable effect on the economy, on asset markets, even once rates are normalized? We haven’t really had that situation in the U.S. before.”

‘Precisely Analogous’

No country has ever had a comparable increase in the size of its portfolio and unwound it “in the precisely analogous way,” Bernanke said in response to questions from members of the House Financial Services Committee. Japan was the only nation to use asset purchases, or quantitative easing, before the U.S. and is “still in that situation,” he said.

The Fed isn’t planning an immediate exit and continues to add to its stimulus, buying $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and Treasuries each month. It has left the duration and size of the program open-ended.

Policy makers in December linked their benchmark borrowing cost to economic indicators for the first time, pledging to hold the rate near zero as long as projected inflation isn’t more than 2.5 percent and joblessness exceeds 6.5 percent. Unemployment was 7.7 percent in February.

Still, the tools the U.S. central bank plans to employ, such as paying interest on reserves, “have been used quite frequently by central banks and they seem to work,” Bernanke told the House committee. The Fed finances the expansion of its portfolio by creating bank reserves. While policy makers gained the ability to pay interest on this cash in 2008, they’ve never used it to tighten policy.

Stop Reinvesting

Under the current exit strategy, the Fed would cease reinvesting some or all principal payments from its securities, revise its interest-rate outlook, raise the federal funds rate and then start selling housing debt to eliminate it from its holdings in three to five years.

Central bankers have kept the target on overnight loans between banks at zero to 0.25 percent since December 2008. They plan to help move the effective rate by changing the interest on excess reserves, at 0.25 percent since 2008, and using so-called reserve-draining tools, according to the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s June 2011 meeting.

“The one thing we could do differently” is “hold some of the securities a little longer,” Bernanke said Feb. 27. “We could even let them just run off.”

‘Robotic Fashion’

Policy makers are reconsidering bond sales in response to criticism that their third round of purchases is exacerbating the potential for the central bank to, “in a robotic fashion, dump assets” on the market, causing interest rates to climb rapidly, said Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Corp. in New York.

The Fed could refrain from selling bonds for this reason and to avoid taking losses on its securities holdings, Governor Jerome Powell said in a Feb. 22 speech in New York. Given the increase in the Fed’s balance sheet, the period of time during which it’s appropriate to unload assets “probably has lengthened,” San Francisco Fed President John Williams also told reporters after a Feb. 21 New York speech.

“They’re trying to address the new favorite concern, which is: ‘The exit will be disruptive to markets, so stop buying those assets because you’re making the exit even harder,’” said Harris, a former New York Fed researcher and author of “Ben Bernanke’s Fed: The Federal Reserve After Greenspan.”

Asset Sales

With the chance of large asset sales receding, the yield on 10-year Treasuries probably will remain between 1.8 percent and 2.25 percent this year, said Krishna Memani, the New York-based chief investment officer of OppenheimerFunds Inc.’s $79.1 billion fixed-income portfolio.

The benchmark 10-year note declined today, pushing the yield up one basis point to 2.05 percent as of 8:40 a.m. in London, according to Bloomberg Bond

Trader data.

“The Fed is saying that if the economy stabilizes, yes, rates will rise, but it’s not imminent and don’t panic about the fact we’re going to sell trillions of securities,” Memani said. “The last thing the Fed wants to do is snuff out the recovery in the housing market” by putting pressure on mortgage bonds.

Bernanke said Feb. 27 it’s “worth discussing” whether the Fed should use guidance on how long it plans to hold its securities as a “substitute” for asset-purchase stimulus.

While Harris said he expects interest on reserves to be an effective tightening tool, it’s still “unlikely, frankly” the Fed will hold assets to maturity because elevated bank reserves, while not currently inflationary, may cause the economy eventually to overheat.

Inflation Problem

“If the Fed were to leave reserves in the banking system too long, and there were to be a big surge in spending -- absolutely, we have an inflation problem,” he said.

Not all policy makers are convinced that holding onto the bonds is a viable strategy. Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser told reporters after a March 6 speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that it’s too soon to know whether the Fed can withdraw its easing this way.

“I don’t know how we can commit to never selling,” Plosser said. “We don’t know the answer to that, so it’s hard to pre-commit, to say we can’t sell assets even in the face of rising inflation.”

Robert Eisenbeis, a former research director at the Atlanta Fed, also said he doubts the central bank can control inflation just through paying interest on reserves.

Real World

“You can’t do it,” said Eisenbeis, who’s now chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors in Sarasota, Florida. “They’re naive in that sense. Their models are one thing, but the real world is another.”

Eisenbeis said the Fed doesn’t “know what the elasticity of demand” is for reserves in the banking system and proposed that policy makers raise reserve requirements to a very high level now. Then they could commit to reducing the requirements as the economy expands, regulating the amount of cash banks have to lend out, he said.

Returning the balance sheet to normal would “make the whole exercise of controlling the funds rate a lot cleaner,” said Antulio Bomfim, a senior managing director at Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in Washington and a former Fed economist.

The fed funds effective rate traded at 0.16 percent on March 7. That’s 0.09 percentage point less than financial institutions earn for parking their cash at the central bank.

Big Deal

“There is always some slippage between the funds rate and the IOER rate,” Bomfim said. “So you might say that’s not a big deal now, but once you start raising rates, you might want the link to be a little bit tighter. One way is to take the reserves out of the system.”

Bomfim forecasts the Fed ultimately will go ahead with sales that “would be gradual and well-communicated in advance.” Given it’s an untested tool, the Fed would “want to tread lightly.”

Bernanke said Feb. 27 that it would “be maybe an extra year” before the central bank’s balance sheet got “back down to a more normal size” if policy makers choose not to sell securities.

“Most on the FOMC and outside the Fed agree it would be best for the balance sheet to get back to normal,” Barclays’ Maki said. “The disagreement comes about how quickly, over what kind of time frame that normalization should occur.”
Click to expand...

loquitur · Mar 19, 2013

We should have had a few failures and a lot fewer bailouts. No one wants any short-term pain, but the result has been a chronic sickness, where the patient isn't crippled but also never really heals. This dysfunctional financial oligopoly that emerged from the financial crisis (with its ratcheted oligarchical effects on politics) will be distorting our political economy for a long time.

Baraka_Guru · Mar 19, 2013

loquitur said: ↑

We should have had a few failures and a lot fewer bailouts. No one wants any short-term pain, but the result has been a chronic sickness, where the patient isn't crippled but also never really heals. This dysfunctional financial oligopoly that emerged from the financial crisis (with its ratcheted oligarchical effects on politics) will be distorting our political economy for a long time.
Click to expand...

From what I understand, there were dozens of large banks that failed to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. Add to that the scores of smaller banks that disappeared on a weekly basis after 2008, and, yeah, the oligopoly was certainly strengthened. The bigger banks went on rummage sales to acquire these assets.

loquitur · Mar 19, 2013

Massive consolidation brokered by the feds. That doesnt' meet the definition of failure in my book.

rogue49 · Mar 19, 2013

hmm...the Fed just put in 88 Billion into the Dept of Treasury as profit from the bonds it buys.

Maybe this is why it doesn't care how much it spends...

Plan A

Print your own money. (now not based on any substance, like gold, but only on how much others value it...which right now is "the best" by global comparison)

Buy bonds from your own area. (which helps support the value of your money, since you're helping your area/people/nation - growth/stability)

Cash out bonds when they mature, profit

Put money back into own bank

Plan B

Print your own money

Loan funds out to your nation's banks

Banks loan out money to corporations and people (allowing your citizens to become more productive)

Corps and people repay loans for the most part

Profit from repayment of loans from banks

Put money back into own bank

Money is an illusion.
Power is the ability of your nation.

Which is why developing nations are screwed often...corruption, destruction, death...all of which disrupt any productivity, infrastructure or investment. (from internal or external)

So the thing is, we need to get rid of the holes...corruption, non-investment into infrastructure, deal with crisises ASAP, improve health.

Baraka_Guru · Mar 19, 2013

rogue49 said: ↑

Money is an illusion.
Power is the ability of your nation.

Which is why developing nations are screwed often...corruption, destruction, death...all of which disrupt any productivity, infrastructure or investment. (from internal or external)

So the thing is, we need to get rid of the holes...corruption, non-investment into infrastructure, deal with crisises ASAP, improve health.
Click to expand...

Including something like this?

View: http://youtu.be/WAjL_X_ZesE

samcol · Mar 20, 2013

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Including something like this?

View: http://youtu.be/WAjL_X_ZesE
Click to expand...

not sure if you're on board with what he's saying or against it?

Baraka_Guru · Mar 21, 2013

samcol said: ↑

not sure if you're on board with what he's saying or against it?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, you have what appears to be the democratization of currency. However, the risk in this is not so much the democratization, but the fact that the wealthy will essentially control it. I'm not sure which is worse, the wealthy controlling currency or the government (whether influenced by the wealthy or not).

On the other hand, the idea that people could be widely paid $100 an hour seems ludicrous, but a part of me wants to give it credence. Even Elizabeth Warren has been asking about wages. Rather than look at currency, she looks at productivity gains and wonders why the minimum wage isn't more like $22/hour.

If you factor in both issues, maybe it would explain why trickle-up economics has been so successful. After all, who benefits most from monetary policy (such as low interest rates and QE) and productivity gains?

Overall, I get a strong sense of cognitive dissonance from this. It's difficult to get my mind around it, because these ideas are new(ish) to me.

rogue49 · Mar 21, 2013

Again, money is illusion...so it will only gain value as people value it.

However, I will say this...I would say that it is in the long-run fairly speculative.
Because nations have the capacity of their people and production to back up it worth and the ability to pay it back.

This denomination is more like a stock, based on the value of the program.
If it goes into a crisis for some reason, and this happens often enough, it will devalue immediately.
Larger nations stick around...the same can't be said for web concepts.

There's a reason that the US dollar is traded and kept, as well as the EU's euro.
Even now, the Euro is having more difficulty than the Dollar, since the US is doing well in comparison...and the EU is fractious.
If the program loses favor, it will dive faster than a national currency.

It would be worse than a run on a bank.
Because not only the bank would be emptied, but the currency being taken would be worth less, if not nil.
You just need one really bad rumor or trend.

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