Bunch of fascists trying to protest the rightful rule of the Communist Party of Democrats of America. This next election we will have 100 fascists on one side and 100 communists on the other and 10 moderatists in the middle

I don't believe there are many Republicans in favor of Corporatist Socialism or Romanticized Environmentalism nor terribly many Democrats in favor of Internationalist Revolution or Proletarian Cultural Values.

It's the self-serving interests of the Federal Reserve that people are protesting. Despite its name, the Federal Reserve is a PRIVATE corporation, NOT owned by the government nor the people, with the singular and all-powerful right to print money on behalf of the government. Every dollar they print is then loaned to the government WITH INTEREST! The American financial system is inherent broken due to this one fact; a PRIVATE corporation has been charged with the most powerful PUBLIC interest, the printing and regulation of MONEY, and it has to end if America is to be fixed long-term...

OBAMA !!!
kick palin and foxnews to hell

Thank you, Andrew Jackson. The Fed is not really a private corporation to even the degree that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were. The Fed does not make real profits. The shareholders only earn a 6% yield, which was set by statute to be about equal to treasury bonds. Nor have the shares ever appreciated in 98 years. The Congressionally appointed Governors outnumber the voting members among the regional Presidents, who are "privately" appointed. Plus the voting is generally the reverse, with the banker voting against the bailouts and the bureaucrats voting for. And most of the banker appointees are relatively well regarded academic economists, who are rather unworldly with respect to personal materialism. Vulgar corruption is not terribly prevalent.

The Fed's profits beyond the nothing that it pays to a very small number of shareholders is transferred every year to the Treasury.

@GOD....Obama is probably toast. Statistics that will be released over the next few months seem to show a new recession beginning with an extremely high probability. Start at 9.2% unemployment and add another recession down leg to that on top of the record levels of long term joblessness. The US is already around 12% below trend level growth and not catching up.

I have strongly believed since about the end of Spring 2008 that Obama made a horrible mistake to run the kind of campaign that he ran. When you ask people to project their own hopes onto you without articulating what you actually stand for, you are implicitly trying to be all things to all people, which makes you nothing to everyone. You're destined to disappoint a good portion of the people supporting you, and they will not respond by believing that they misunderstood who you are, they will believe that you lied to them. They will end up hating you more than your enemies do. Beyond the fact that these were a good bit of the dynamics that killed Carter, Devel Patrick was already showing the negative consequences of this strategy in 2008, and he was probably a causal factor in Obama's failures in Massachusetts even with Kennedy support and the later election of Brown.

Wow, someone's been thoroughly brainwashed; you keep thinking that gopher27, as the Fed unleashes QE3 and ensures that the American dollar isn't fit to wipe your ass with...

You probably believe the 9/11 was done by al-Qaeda too, and somehow a fire on a few floors of two buildings somehow felled THREE buildings, miraculously all into their own footprint too... O_O

@AdamNTM.....I'm unclear what you are asserting. I thought you were claiming that a "private" entity was printing money and loaning it to the government and earning interest based profit from this act. The Congress appoints an absolute majority of the voting members at every FOMC meeting. The profits of the Fed, minus a very small portion, are transferred back to the Treasury every year. I would not classify the Fed as a truly "private" entity, and it is not accumulating significant profits from its operations. Admittedly, I am a rent seeker whose lifestyle is subsidized by the positive net cash flow of the Fed which is transferred to fund its operations (and its employees) rather than paid out as profits to the Treasury. I have yet to figure out why the cafeteria at the Fed charges 11% sales tax, though, so the subsidies go only so far.

While one can reasonably disagree with the policy choices of the Fed or the efficacy of Operation Twist (QE3 seems unlikely as such for the moment), I thought you were challenging the basic motivations of the actors involved. Perhaps claiming the existence of a conspiracy of the self-serving to intentionally do harm to the many for the private gain of the few. BTW, the last clutch of protesters I passed on my way in and out of the Fed were protesting US recognition of the Government of Equatorial Guinea, the relation of which to the Federal Reserve I am unsure of.

"Not accumulating significant profits"; really? I wasn't aware that the Fed had opened its books to ANYONE, let alone you! Who needs "profit" when you control the printing presses! If you think that America is still a democracy, then I fear for you, because it is a plutocracy, rule by the rich pure and simple. Politicians don't rule the world, banksters do through their lobbyists...

The OP is asking the wrong questions. I don't believe these people are protesting about the actions of some institution whether it's the FED, the NYSE or anything else. Furthermore, I don't think they have any specific solutions to specific problems.

I believe that the media are mistaken in separating strikes and protests in Greece, protests in Israel, riots in the UK, the Arab Spring, strikes in France, Spain and Portugal and the Occupy Wall Street protests.

They are not protesting a specific problem but merely expressing an inchoate anger at a fall in the standards of living that seems to be borne disproportionately by people who work for a living. That's why it won't achieve anything (except perhaps the fall of a government or two here and there).

@AdamNTM....the Fed's balance sheet is a matter of public record. I can name three researchers at the Fed who actually post in on their websites. The WSJ posts a very nice user friendly graphic quarterly that show all assets and liabilities of the Federal Reserve. The Fed writes a check to the US Treasury every quarter transferring all accumulated profits to the federal balance sheet. Again the CBO should have a a publicly available auditing of the receipts. What we are discussing is utterly unrelated to whether or not the USA is a democracy. It is not, never has been and was never intended to be. We are discussing an institution a super majority of whose governing board are appointed by Congress and who testify frequently before Congress in a regular manner prescribed by law. You asserted that it was "private" entity seeking private profit. I believe that that is demonstrably false. Other than a small flow od non-increasing dividends and the probable over staffing by rent seeking parasites like myself, the Fed transfers all available resources generated by its operations directly to the Treasury. The main point of the public auditing debate is the activities of the discount window and the nitty gritty of the very aggregated descriptions of assets on the Fed's balance sheet. If you care to study the timeline of the Great Contraction (1929-1933), the worst shock to the US economy was in the lead up to the 1932 election, when "Cactus Jack" Garner and the Democrat controlled House published the dis-aggregated balance sheet of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and caused the last most massive bank run which resulted in the cascading bank holidays of the 1933. That was the final cataclysm that put the US economy totally on its back and led to the 20th Amendment of the Constitution and the FDIC. There are reasonable arguments for not publicly publishing the dis-aggregated balance sheet of the Fed beyond a presumed fear of oversight. But the Fed is audited and the CBO does take an active interest in its accounting. No bank like institution could publish an up to date list of its depositor and debtors and hope to have customers. The Fed wants banks to use the discount window actively to smooth out liquidity issues. That is why it exists. If banks faced a public knowledge of their liquidity issues communicated through their use of the discount window, then they would never use it for fear of perceived counterparty risk in their other operations.

I'm not too informed, but think that the more sensible answer here is Alcuin's one

"...we are discussing an institution a super majority of whose governing board are appointed by Congress...", and who puts these Congressmen in their positions? It's a simple matter of the foxes guarding the henhouse. You must be rich gopher27, because the other 99% of us are getting fleeced by the monetary policy of the Fed, and in 5-10 years there will be no middle class any more. It's manufactured crisis after manufactured crisis, meant to squeeze out the little guy and leave the the uber-rich holding what remains of the nation's / world's wealth. I'm sorry, but when directors of the board include such people as William C. Dudley (formerly of Goldman-Sachs), and Jamie Dimons (currently of JP Morgan-Chase), all I'm seeing are plutarchs who have greased the right palms to get into power. That's the beauty of it, Americans have been hijacked of what was once the envy of the world in terms of standards of living, and all-too-many of them are still all-too-ready to just accept it as "the way things are"; it's the New Egypt, where 99% are enslaved to the 1% via the invisible, weightless-yet-all-too-burdensome shackles known as "debt"...

Those men are merely the board of the New York Regional Bank. Their only power is to hire and fire the Regional President of the New York Fed, who has a single vote on the FOMC. The Board of Governors are all appointed by Congress and the President and they have 7 votes to the Regional Presidents' 5 votes. The Federal Reserve was decentralized by Congressman Glass and Woodrow Wilson to alter the Aldrich Plan and dramatically reduce the ability of the New York Fed to be used by Wall Street and the Money Center Banks to gain disproportionate influence over monetary policy. The one member of the board of my Fed that I have met manufactures plumbing supplies in a rural town that you couldn't find on a map without Google's help.

AdamNTM, your assertions are inconsistent. You argued at first that the Fed was a "private" institution exploiting the Government. I believe I have demonstrated that the Government is well in control of the Fed and now you argue that the Government is "private" and I guess exploiting itself.

But the logical point that I must make because your causal chain is simply too glaringly nonsensical is your last comment about debt. If the Fed is debasing the money supply as part of a nefarious plot, the effect would be to wipe away debt and level society. While the Middle Class could be negatively affected, the negative effect that they would feel would be a creditors, not as debtors. The savings of the nation would be washed away; the debts would not become massively burdensome. This is simply how inflation works. It does have the effect of eroding Middle Class living standards, but it does so by destroying their ability to save as it transfers wealth from the creditors of a society to its debtors.

The main effect the Fed's policy is really having is transferring wealth from the low household debt middle of the country to the high debt coasts. This is what is happening in an explicit household to household manner; however, there are bigger General Equilibrium effects as a commodity levered middle of the country also benefits in other ways from inflation. Back in the 1980s, Jim Grant wrote a memorable article contrasting my hometown of Houston with Boston. He held up Houston as the city most levered to benefit from inflation while Boston was the city most levered to win in a deflationary environment.

As for my personal wealth, I am a not particularly materialistic person. I made considerably more money in my last job. My current career will never provide me the kind of remuneration that my previous one did. My shift was completely voluntary. I actually had great difficulty spending my income and still do to some extent today. At this moment, I have more money in my checking account that I made last year, gross, not even net. I'd be willing to wager that your level of total consumption last year was higher than mine. My average annual level of consumption for the last five years has been less than 40% of the American median, which is the statistical definition of poverty.

So being in Middle America and possessing a large checking account, as opposed to an overly large house, I am a self-interested opponent of inflation and loose monetary policy. Possessing cash savings, secure employment and a stable income, I should favor deflation that would lower the cash cost to me of goods I wish to consume.

I would point your attention to Europe. The ECB is maintaining a tighter monetary policy and the results are worth examining. Spain today is facing massive deflationary pressures and has exhibited a 45% youth unemployment rate for over 2 years now. My friend Marta graduated last year with a masters degree in engineering and is working for 24,000 Euros, which terms of actual buying power is not much more than $24,000, irrespective of what exchange rates tell you.

Gopher, I appreciate your well-crafted responses. I also appreciate your veiled offer to allow me to help spend your excess income. Thank you on both accounts.

I've enjoyed reading this thread. Nothing to do about Dip (unless I want to use it to gratuitously promote a game of "Who Controls America" - anyone interested?) Still fun nonetheless!

@gopher: so do you like the ECB or not ?

I don't have a checking account full of Euros, so I'm ambivalent on their general inflationary versus deflationary bias accept to the degree that it affects my life. And I'm not smart enough to work out the full implications of the General Equilibrium effects of their policy decisions on me. I guess they should have done a better job of regulating their banks as private banks in Europe were even more reckless than their American cousins and are in worse shape today, but I have a strong suspicion that that culpability lies with various politicians totally unconnected to the ECB.

:((

gopher27, you honestly believe that there is no nepotism going on within the government and banking sectors? You don't see the possibility that this is all a manufactured crisis, meant to force governments to come together to form a worldwide central bank (I know the IMF does this, but its power would become MUCH more entrenched with such a development)? This is, in effect, a move to force countries to give up their sovereignty to an overarching world bank; this is why the Greeks are rebelling so hard, because they are the first country to have to experience this "new world order". Their property taxes have gone through the roof as a result of trying to pay back their national debt; the banks that Greece owes to, effectively own Greece now.

And the effect of the Fed debasing the money supply will NOT wipe out debt; it will simply force the U.S.A. to restructure, it will force them to declare bankruptcy, abandon the Dollar, and get on a worldwide unit of currency. Believe me, the TBTF banks will NOT be letting go of any nation's debt; the U.S. will, along with Canada and Mexico, be force to adopt the Amero (you've heard of the Amero I assume? It's theoretical right now, but the stage is being set to implement it). Your theory is accurate, but you're assuming the powers-that-be want to keep the current system afloat; they don't. They want to force the world to restructure, a "new world order", with a world central bank, and the banksters with it, at the helm...

Wow........... You've been listening to a lot of Alex Jones. I keep hearing all about this NWO, and have been for a while. Oddly, although I keep hearing "it's about to take place, just you wait," it *hasn't* taken place, despite my waiting.

Last I heard, George W. Bush was going to implement it. Then Obama became the obvious front-man. I wonder who "the shadow" will appoint in 2012?

Don't get me wrong, I am all about conspiracy theories and trying to discern manipulation of the masses, but I can play that game only so long. At some point, you have to stop looking for boogie men under every rock, because the fact of the matter is that although the US Government encroaches on personal freedoms and insert any other complaint you want, I don't think we can claim we're any closer today to a world government than we were 10 years ago.

"Setting the stage" for the takeover isn't the same as the purported takeover, and the stage-setting has been going on so long one has to wonder when they actually oppression will occur. I mean, with the "FEMA concentration camps" already in place I can't figure out why the NWO hasn't already acted. /end sarcasm

Hm I`m not a friend of these big conspirancys.
The world is like it is and there are many individuums which are all egoistic and together they produce our world like it is.

"many individuums which are all egoistic and together they produce our world like it is."

I can usually discern these people based on the names they select for themselves in online games...! o.O

@AdamNTM.....I'm going to limit my response to only two comments: i) to me your assertions seem to be constantly shifting and I do not feel like I am responding to the same arguments and so I shall stop trying; ii) I went to an elite university and have relatively close personal friends at the top of many of the "usual suspect" institutions. Believe me when I tell you that you are investing these people with far more competence than they deserve. You should be far more concerned with the stupidity and incompetence of our governing elite than their omnipotence. When I have had the occasion to have reasonably in depth conversations with the people running our world, my main reaction has been to be stunned by how ignorant they are of basic realities of the world, especially as this is so frequently coupled with an incredible arrogance related to their own mental capacities.

In everyday life, I know three of the people who attend every FOMC meeting. They are not conspiring to do anything. The people on the FOMC privately view themselves as trying a policy, seeing if it works, analyzing the results and then trying something else, all while pretending to know what they are doing. They privately wonder whether they have implemented very effective policy that has prevented a catastrophe, voted for counterproductive policy that has made things worse or simply had no effect at all. In the quite spaces of their most private thoughts, none of them really know. If you would like to discuss the power players of our economics policy as ignorant incompetents, I cannot really refute your assertions, but these people are not conspiring with a Money Trust to overthrow the Republic. They really are not by and large terribly materialistic people. Arrogant and power mad, perhaps, but I don't peg any of them as lusting after bigger houses or nicer cars or greater financial rewards in their every day lives. They live in very nice houses in outer ring suburbs, drive nice imported cars and seem satisfied with their upper middle class lives and fortunes.

I would more than entertain arguments related to the intellectual and cultural and philosophical homogeneity of our society's elite and how a universal collective ignorance and monolithic worldview would lead them to make catastrophic mistakes. The policy making elites do all tend to come from the same place ideologically and therefore have a tendency to never spot certain logical fallacies that they all fall victim to. They also probably do have much more in common in terms of worldview with the financial elites on Wall street and in the City of London than they do with a randomly selected citizen on the US. I think the danger is the cultural capture of elite group-think more than the kind of political capture that you seem to be implying.

Time will tell...

They are protesting the fact that they lacked the intelligence to make money off the stock market.

@LoveDove: what do you want to say ?
o.O