The Fed – that venerable private banking institution that regulates the money supply, the worth of the dollar and sets the prime interest rate to heat up and cool the cash flow – has always been ignored by Capitol Hill and the President.
But now it's become impossible for the Board of Governors to quietly paper over the nation's budget deficits and escape the oversight and accountability of a desperate population struggling to break free of a credit crunch and economic crisis of epic proportions while waiting to wake up from a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse - in Technicolor and Cinemascope.
It was embarrassingly difficult to ignore the chilly reception President Barack Hussein Obama received from Asian chiefs of state at Seoul last week during the G-20 summit conference.
The nation's chief creditors were decidedly uptight about the Federal Reserve's announcement that it will soon begin buying up the national debt to the tune of $600 billion.
In fact, the situation is considered so alarming that no less than World Bank President Robert Zoellick suggested gold could play a helpful role in the global monetary system. Serving as a reference against more volatile “fiat” currencies, the precious metal could be viewed as money.
Say again?
Money.
Who needs it?
The finance ministers from the Group of 20 who are hanging out there over the chasm with noting in their bulging saddlebags but American paper, that's who.
Suddenly, the Fed is receiving political and media scrutiny galore, something strange and very unusual in a nation of go-go cowboy capitalists and coupon clippers now forced to tiptoe through the t-bonds and t-bills barefoot and bereft of a strong form of legal tender, looking for something to smile about while stomaching the stimulus.
Listen to the platitudes as they float by like trial balloons at the obligatory press appearance and “news opportunity” last week in Seoul between President Obama and the Chinese chief of state, President Hu.
The simple truth is this and nothing less. The debt stands at $1.4 trillion with no clear cut plan to address the problem.
I said I have no clear cut perception of the problem with which to address the problem. No plan. No approach with which to assess, examine or attempt to even describe the magnitude of the mess they done got us in now. I think I heard a pretty dame on the television say it would take as long as 425,000 years to pay it off if thus, so, such and such and blah blah blah, etc., etc.
Faced with something of that magnitude, all a little old pot-bellied man knows to say is to shrug, shake his gray old head and recite that wondrous word, "Whatever."
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