While Trump worries about his reelection prospects

An important source of income for roughly 30 million unemployed people in the United States is set to end, threatening their ability to meet rent and pay bills and potentially undercutting the fragile economic recovery.

In March, Congress approved an extra $600 in weekly unemployment benefits as part of its $2 trillion relief package aimed at offsetting the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. That additional payment expires next week unless it gets renewed.

  alJazeera

Former Federal Reserve Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen urged Congress on Friday to do more to help the economy deal with the devastating coronavirus pandemic, such as extending increased unemployment benefits and providing assistance to hard-hit states and local governments, something many Republicans oppose.

The two former Fed leaders, making their first appearances before a congressional panel since leaving the central bank, praised the efforts already made by the Fed and Congress but said both should be ready to do more given the severity of the shock the economy has endured.

[...]

Yellen and Bernanke, in a joint statement to a House Oversight subcommittee, said the new measure should provide substantial support to state and local governments.

[...]

"The enormous loss of revenue from the recession, together with the new responsibilities imposed by the pandemic, has put state and local budgets deeply in the red."

[...]

The administration of President Donald Trump and many GOP members of Congress are arguing for restraint, saying the federal government should not be bailing out states.

  alJazeera

They'd like to have the country collapse, apparently.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Metaphysical Ben Bernanke

The Fed and The Money

I'm not able to make any intelligent comment on that chart, but I do understand a couple of things from the accompanying Matt Yglesias post, The Money Base Is Irrelevant:

Banks are required to keep a certain amount of non-lendable money in reserves. Now check this:

[As] these charts show, there's a veritable avalanche of money the Fed could unleash upon the economy were it not deliberately paying banks to keep the money out of play.

[…]

[In] 2008, Ben Bernanke decided that the Fed should start paying interest on excess reserves and also embarked on a large increase in the monetary base. The chart makes clear, however, that relative to trend all of this money creation has just gone into excess reserves.

  Slate

Gee. Imagine that. The Fed starts paying interest on excess reserves (reserves that banks voluntarily keep beyond the requirements), so banks start putting more money into excess reserves. Who would have imagined?  That money they were given (after they took part in the worst financial boondoggle in modern history) for the purpose of making new loans and getting the economy back on its feet - that money from taxpayer pockets, we might add - didn't quite make it where it was supposed to go, and all the while I have been hearing people blaming the banksters (rightly) for not circulating it, but I heard no one talking about the fact that they were not only not circulating it, but they were making money on it through Fed interest payments!  I missed that piece.  I assumed they were investing it.  Ha!  That would have been taking a risk. In the end, the result of the money being kept out of public hands, to do what it was supposedly going to do, is the same either way, but the fact that the Fed set it up intentionally to benefit the banksters is a far cry from the public claim that it was intended to benefit the public/economy.

This may be old news to you, but it's the first I've seen it.  I didn't think I could be more disgusted with Ben Bernanke (and his enablers in the White House).  How wrong I can sometimes be.

So all this recent talk about how the Fed is doing such an intricate balancing act these days, and how Bernanke decided in his great wisdom not to print more money at the moment – excuse me, I meant engage in quantitative easing – completely ignores the fact that the money is already there and could be circulated if the Fed would stop paying banks to hold onto it. Why are we even arguing about printing money - I mean, quantitative easing?  The banksters are being further enriched while we argue over a red herring. Which we’ll be lucky to be able to afford to eat once a week if things go on the way they are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Time, Banksters, You've Gone Too Far

So says the House.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday for a piece of legislation Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has been pushing for more than a decade, calling for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the nation’s central bank, despite the Federal Reserve chairman’s warning that such action could produce a “nightmare scenario.”

Members of the House passed Paul’s “Audit the Fed” bill by a vote of 327-98. Only one Republican voted against the bill: Rep. Bob Turner of New York. In all, 89 Democrats joined Republicans in passing the bill, including arguably the chamber’s most liberal member, outgoing Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who cited recent reporting by The Washington Post that claims the New York Federal Reserve knew but did not tell regulators about manipulation [of] a key inter-bank lending rate known as Libor.

[...]

The Texas stalwart and longtime foe of central bankers supported a Fed audit in 2010 that became part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That audit required the Fed to disclose its lending practices during the 2008 financial crisis, revealing that the bank doled out more than $16 trillion in loans and assets swaps to financial institutions all over the world in an effort to stabilize global markets.

[Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke warned that any effort by Congress to compromise the independence of the Fed would weaken its ability to stabilize the economy in the event of a crisis like the near-collapse of 2008.

“The nightmare scenario that I have is one in which some future Fed chairman would decide to say, raise the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, and somebody in this room would say, ‘I don’t like this decision and I want the [Government Accountability Office] to go in… and give us an independent opinion of whether or not that would be the right decision,’” he said.

  Raw Story

Oooh. Nightmare!

[The Dodd-Frank Act] did not satisfy Paul, who saw it as a stripped-down version of his original proposal because it did not examine Fed monetary policy negotiations as well.

[...]

While the victory will likely be seen as one of Paul’s crowning achievements in Congress, it will progress no further this session thanks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who has refused to bring it up

Gotta protect those banksters.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tom Toles

Just What Is Bernanke's Word Worth?

US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke told Republican lawmakers Wednesday that he cannot and will not bailout struggling European economies, senators at the meeting said.

Amid suspicions that Fed funds may be used to help debt-ridden eurozone countries, leading Republican Lindsay Graham said Bernanke assured senators “he doesn’t have the intention or the authority to do that.”

  

Of course he has the “authority.” The Fed is beholden to no one but the bankers that run it. And he might not bail out European economies per se, but I feel quite certain that he’ll bail out any European central bank that comes a callin’. And he won’t necessarily tell us he’s doing it, either.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.