For a great many regular hard-working, tax-paying American citizens the way money works in the modern world is very much a mystery. This is not surprising, considering that money has always been a mystery shrouded in mythical associations, psychological phobias and religious overtones. And designed to be thus by those who do know how money works. When the US Federal Reserve was established in 1913, it was not actually made a National Bank under the control of the government, it was established by and for the wealthiest bankers and Wall Street barons as an independent entity with only ceremonial ties to the federal government.
In a critique of the ancient psychological “money complex” in his book Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown explored the debt-guilt association in the essay Filthy Lucre. Brown wrote, “Whatever the ultimate explanation of guilt may be, we put forward the hypothesis that the whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt.”
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that a development in late June of 2008 that rocked the American financial world went largely unreported in this country. It appeared in an article of Spiegel Online on June 26, 2008, entitled The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve.
It seems that the International Monetary Fund [IMF] became concerned about the rate of inflation Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was allowing in 2008, and how that was affecting the price of goods – primarily crude oil – all over the world and translating into flashing neon signs of coming recession. Because the world’s financial dealings are tied to the US dollar’s value, the IMF exercised an option under its bylaws that it had never before exercised in regards to the United States: it scheduled an audit of the entire US financial system.
As part of that audit the Fed, the SEC, the major investment banks, mortgage banks and hedge funds were to hand over confidential documents to the IMF auditors. About two thirds of IMF member states have undergone this process since the Fund was started, so the US really didn’t have the power to opt out. President Bush refused for seven long years of his administration to allow the IMF audit, even as he ran up the debt grotesquely with his oil wars, no-bid contracts, free-for-all bubble-blowing on Wall Street, etc. Your basic Republican cash-out before turning the country over to Democrats who spend 4 or 8 years thereafter trying hard to repair the damage the greedheads have done.
Bush finally agreed to the IMF audit, so long as it didn’t begin until his last weeks in office and isn’t scheduled to end until after he was gone. 2010, to be exact. The auditors took up residence last July, just two months before the CDS bubble burst and took both Wall Street and the Fed down with it. Bernanke had already lowered the interest rates so drastically that he practically had to pay banks to borrow money, and this left him no leverage as the shit hit the fan. When our economy tipped, so did everyone else’s. As the IMF was no doubt concerned about.
It’s hard to know who is most responsible for the fix we’re in. George Bush’s wars, his friends’ greed, the Fed’s inaction, the funds’ CDS pyramid scheme, the insurers’ ridiculous gambling bets, or the oil companies who drove the prices up so far in the months before the election that half of America stopped driving (thereby cutting demand way down even as the oil barons racked up obscene profits). We may suppose the IMF is going to find out.
The best indicator that there was collusion and much back room dirty dealing going on is the fact that the audit began in ernest (the paperwork was due) on September 30, 2008, the end of the fiscal year, though the warnings had been issued in June. September 30, 2008 also just happens to be the exact date that George W. Bush claimed that half a trillion dollars’ in immediate bailout money just HAD to be in the hands of those institutions the IMF was planning to audit, or the economy will collapse!
Could it all have been not just unethical, but illegal even by whatever rudimentary banking and investment rules remained after W. wiped most actual regulations off the books early in his term? Does this explain the mass exodus to off-shoring havens of the bonus babies We the People have been forced to pay off with our hard-earned dollars? Will there come a time of reckoning when the world’s crookedest greedheads and game-players will be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity?
Stay tuned, dear readers. This one is bound to keep rearing its dragon head as the audit proceeds. Should be interesting!
Links:
The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve
Corrente: IMF to audit US Financial System
Did IMF Audit Lead to (expose) US Economic Collapse?
Banks Holding Up in Tests, but May Still Need Aid