On the recordJanuary 24, 2011
In the last several weeks, there have been several articles published by officials from the Federal Reserve system. This is a little bit unusual because they are critical of anybody who criticizes them and are critical of me in particular. In these articles, they are trying to discredit anybody who disagrees with their policies, and they are very defensive of this. They have argued the case that they should have total secrecy. In this total secrecy, I claim they have tremendous power to do the things that they want to do, and it has only been recently that the American people and this Congress have awakened to this. Although we did not get a full audit of the Fed last year, we did get a partial audit of the emergency funding, but still the Fed's argument is they have to have total independency while the American people believe there should be transparency. The Fed's argument is that they literally are the saviors of the economy, that they came in as an emergency when the markets were crashing, and that they were able to rescue the entire world economy by their injection of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. The fallacy of all this is that they may have rescued some banks and that they may have rescued some big businesses, but they didn't rescue the American people. The consequence of all this has been high unemployment, people losing their houses, and people who can't pay their mortgages.
