Audit The Fed Web Site

AuditTheFed.com includes: contact information for your congressman and senators, petitions, widgets, and banners to promote the website, dynamic graphs of the bill’s cosponsors, a detailed summary of the Audit the Fed bill, a list of our growing coalition, a blog to keep you up to date on all the latest Audit the Fed news, a sign up for email updates, and social networks to help get the word out online.

20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The message for today’s Freedom Movement in America is this – peaceful revolution is possible in modern times. Never give up, never stop spreading the positive message of freedom and liberty.

Is There Really an H1N1 Vaccine Shortage?

This clip comes directly from a session of the Council on Foreign Relations. The full video and transcript are on the CFR web site.

Conspiracy theory? Or conspiracy fact? You decide.

Bernanke’s Secret Plan To Raise Rates Too Late

Business Insider’s Henry Blodgett explains:

Explainer: Bernanke’s Secret Plan To Raise Rates Too Late (3 min):

Why is Ben Bernanke being so slow to start talking about raising rates, much less start raising them?  Because he has a secret plan that he can’t talk about.

What’s Ben’s secret plan?

Intentionally keep rates too low for too long, thus encouraging uncomfortably high inflation.

Why would Ben want that when he keeps talking about the importance of managing inflation?

Two reasons:

• Faster economic growth, which leads to more jobs, fewer angry constituents, and a Congress that’s happier with Ben Bernanke

• Faster erosion of the real value of our debts.  Consumers and the government are drowning under a massive debt load.  One way to make paying off this debt easier is to make the dollars it is denominated in worth less.  Bernanke will try to hasten this process as much as possible, taking it right to the point where our creditor China is mad as hell–but not quite to the point where China actually stops lending to us.

Click for video.

Constituents? Happier Congress? But I thought the whole argument against a full audit of the Fed is that it is supposed to be independent of politics. So which is it?

“Consumers and the government are drowning under a massive debt load. One way to make paying off this debt easier is to make the dollars it is denominated in worth less.”

That works for government and the biggest of the TBTF bankers (GS, JPM) because the dollars aren’t really devalued until they are released into the economy at large. By the time they reach the consumer, the prices of everything consumers might buy have already risen in response to the inflated money supply.

CIT Files Bankruptcy

This has been a long time coming. CIT became a bank-holding company in December 2008 in order to qualify for a bailout from the Treasury taxpayers.  And what about the $2.3 billion of bailout money CIT received? You weren’t really expecting to ever see that again, were you?

Asian markets are in a tailspin after this announcement. I expect tomorrow will be another blood bath on Wall Street. 

This filing is significant not only because it is the fifth largest US bankruptcy ever, but also because CIT was a major source of financing for small and mid-size businesses. The pain from this collapse is going to spread all up and down Main Street.

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) — CIT Group Inc., a 101-year-old commercial lender, filed for bankruptcy to cut $10 billion in debt after the credit crunch dried up its funding and a U.S. bailout and debt exchange offer failed.

CIT listed $71 billion in assets and $64.9 billion in debt in a Chapter 11 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The U.S. Treasury Department said the government probably won’t recover much, if any, of the $2.3 billion in taxpayer money that went to CIT.

The bankruptcy “will allow CIT to continue to provide funding to our small business and middle-market customers,” said Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Peek in a statement.

CIT, which filed the fifth-largest bankruptcy by assets, said it plans to exit quickly due to support from bondholders, who voted in favor of a so-called prepackaged plan. None of CIT’s operating subsidiaries, including Utah-based CIT Bank, were included in the filing, and operations will proceed as normal, CIT said in a statement.

CIT has $1 billion from investor Carl Icahn to fund operations while it reorganizes. The credit line, to be drawn on until Dec. 31, will be a so-called debtor-in-possession loan. It also expanded its $3 billion credit facility by another $4.5 billion on Oct. 28.

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Welcome AlphaInventions Visitors

To all of you finding your way to this blog via AlphaInventions, welcome and thanks for clicking through! I hope you’ll learn a few things and maybe start looking at things in a new way.

I do this blog in my spare time so sometimes it doesn’t get updated for a few days at a stretch, but come back often and leave comments when something interests you.

For those not familiar with AlphaInventions.com , it is an innovative web site & web app written by Cheru Jackson. It displays a continuous cycle of “screenshots” of recent blog updates published by a wide variety of bloggers, helping bloggers connect to each other and to find new readers. Check it out – you’ll see what I mean.

The best thing about AlphaInventions.com? It’s innovation brought about by an individual with an idea and the skills to carry it out. A brilliant example of what the free market can do when it’s allowed to function without government involvement.

 

Ron Paul: Important News on Audit the Fed

Mel Watt – Fed shill, enemy of truth.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=114624

Further investigation through OpenSecrets.org reveals that the largest share of Watt’s campaign contributions in the 2008 election cycle came from the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

Breakdown of industries supporting Rep. Mel Watt’s 2008 campaign (graph from OpenSecrets.org)

In fact, of $609,072 given to Watt, $217,109 – or 35.6 percent – came from the money sector, including over $187,000 – or nearly 31 percent of his total contributions – from political action committees within the finance, insurance and real estate industry. The next highest industry supporting Watt was labor, which contributed only 14 percent of his total war chest.

Furthermore, the four largest contributors to Watt’s cause were Bank of America, Wachovia Corp., American Express and the American Bankers Association.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Watt

Opposition to increased oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
In 2003 Watt vehemently opposed efforts by the George W. Bush administration and Congressional Republicans to increase regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.[7] “I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing”, Mr. Watt said.[7] Watt said that “Brad Miller and I were at the forefront of that more than anybody else in America” in trying to prevent the financial crisis, despite the fact that Watt’s stated position was against an increase and more oversight for high risk lending.[8]

Record Nine Bank Failures Yesterday

The FDIC shuttered nine banks on Oct. 30, 2009, bringing the total for the year so far to 115.

Yesterday’s closures will cost the FDIC an estimated $2.5 billion, combined.

According to an AP report (via Clusterstock):

Regulators shut California National Bank of Los Angeles and eight other banks as the weak economy continues to produce a stream of loan defaults.

The banks closed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation were in California, Illinois, Texas and Arizona. They were divisions of privately held FBOP Corp., a Chicago-based bank holding company.

…

As the economy has soured, with unemployment rising, home prices tumbling and loan defaults soaring, bank failures have cascaded and sapped billions out of the deposit insurance fund. It has fallen into the red.

Failures have been especially concentrated in California, Georgia and Illinois. While the pounding from losses on home mortgages may be nearing an end, delinquencies on commercial real estate loans remain a hot spot of potential trouble, regulators say. If the recession deepens, defaults on the high-risk loans could spike. Many regional banks, especially, hold large concentrations of these loans.

…

The 115 failures are the most in a year since 1992 at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. They have cost the federal deposit insurance fund more than $25 billion so far this year, and hundreds more bank failures are expected to raise the cost to around $100 billion through 2013.

…

The 115 bank failures this year compare with 25 last year and three in 2007.

…

The number of banks on the FDIC’s confidential “problem list” jumped to 416 at the end of June from 305 in the first quarter. That’s the most since June 1994. About 13 percent of banks on the list generally end up failing, according to the FDIC.

Also, be sure to check out this interactive visual of recent bank failures from the Wall Street Journal. The graphics are great. They really help put the whole mess in perspective.

Mel Watt – Fed Shill

This man is an enemy of freedom, prosperity and government transparency. See my previous post for an explanation.

Urgent! Audit the Fed Bill in Trouble!

Federal Reserve Policy Audit Legislation ‘Gutted,’ Paul Says

By Bob Ivry

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.

The bill, with 308 co-sponsors, has been stripped of provisions that would remove Fed exemptions from audits of transactions with foreign central banks, monetary policy deliberations, transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee and communications between the Board, the reserve banks and staff, Paul said today.

“There’s nothing left, it’s been gutted,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.”

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Urgent call to action! Contact your representative today, tomorrow, every day until HR 1207 is restored to its original form. Anything less is simply unacceptable.

Please help show congress we are dead serious about this audit.

New Health Care Bill Has a Tax for Everyone

From HotAir:

Americans for Tax Reform has culled the 1990-page Pelosi health-care overhaul bill to find the taxes that will supposedly collect over $540 billion in revenue over 10 years.  It’s quite an impressive list of new burdens on Americans and their health-care providers and producers — but that’s redundant.  After all, who do you think will end up paying for the medical-device taxes?  It won’t be insurers or doctors:

• Employer Mandate Excise Tax (Page 275): If an employer does not pay 72.5 percent of a single employee’s health premium (65 percent of a family employee), the employer must pay an excise tax equal to 8 percent of average wages.  Small employers (measured by payroll size) have smaller payroll tax rates of 0 percent (<$500,000), 2 percent ($500,000-$585,000), 4 percent ($585,000-$670,000), and 6 percent ($670,000-$750,000).
• Individual Mandate Surtax (Page 296): If an individual fails to obtain qualifying coverage, he must pay an income surtax equal to the lesser of 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) or the average premium.  MAGI adds back in the foreign earned income exclusion and municipal bond interest.
• Medicine Cabinet Tax (Page 324)
• Cap on FSAs (Page 325)
• Increased Additional Tax on Non-Qualified HSA Distributions (Page 326)
• Denial of Tax Deduction for Employer Health Plans Coordinating with Medicare Part D (Page 327)
• Surtax on Individuals and Small Businesses (Page 336)
• Excise Tax on Medical Devices (Page 339)
• Corporate 1099-MISC Information Reporting (Page 344)
• Delay in Worldwide Allocation of Interest (Page 345)
• Limitation on Tax Treaty Benefits for Certain Payments (Page 346)
• Codification of the “Economic Substance Doctrine” (Page 349)
• Application of “More Likely Than Not” Rule (Page 357)

See the ATR post for detailed descriptions of each new tax.