Who are these Federal Reserve loons?

[Blanquist]

I've seen some posts online about evil central bankers and whatever but lately I've been meeting people in real life who say the same thing. "Buy gold and silver, FED is evil, etc"

People I've met aren't some basement dwellers, they have liberal professions like lawyers but they seem really stupid and naive. Or maybe I am because I don't see where they are coming from.

What the hell are they talking about?

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Well, they are these "free market" capitalist, Ron Paul fantastic cultists. The Federal Reserve is printing money to deter another credit freeze, this leads to inflation, something that people with savings don't like. They are idiots, they are the Gang of Eight of Capitalism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

And of course the private banks sit in on the Federal Reserve and make sure that they get near to 0% interest on the debt that they get from the FED, while they turn around and lend it to the public at 6 and on percent. But, if they didn't get such cheap interest rates from the FED, they would have no liquidity, not enough own cash to deal with the next banking crisis. And at the moment it looks very bad.

[MarxSchmarx]

As a generality, hatred of the federal reserve is basically code for "zomg i reckon dem JEWS they be pulling da strings1!one!".

Set aside the crazies worried about lizard people and such.

Even among the more "respectable" croud you mention (perhaps only so in comparison to the batshit insane), there is a lot of mythology surrounding the federal reserve that is strikingly reminiscent of the anti-semitism of yore. Sure, there are no Christian baby bread or whatever, but their ideas of a secret cabal of basically New Yorkers, educated, crafty, vaguely non-protestant/catholic technocrat types rigging a system. They do it by controlling the money supply, putting a "non-material" value on something like gold that should be about blood and soil, not ponderous abstractions.

There is also a myth of a basically pure (i.e., anglo-saxon, christian, agrarian) American financial system that became despoiled conveniently after a massive wave of immigration from eastern europe ultimately resulted in the creation of this vast conspiracy.

A useful analogy is found in Mexico. It's kind of reminiscent of how the superstitions of pre-Columbian religions live on in the popular conception of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It's a mythology of a previous era juxtaposed to understand present realities.

[NewLeft]

I want to direct you to this article from Wolff, he wrote a brief piece on the fed: 'Is the federal reserve the real source of power/control in a society of capitalism?'

To be clear, I think the FED and how it works is definitely a part of the problem - that is, part of the economic system that imploded in 2007-2008 and whose immensely costly social effects are now hurting millions of our fellow citizens. After all, how could it be otherwise? The FED is the central bank of the US, our equivalent of the Bank of England, the bank of France, etc. in other countries. Its job is to serve and also coordinate and protect the banking system in the US (overwhelmingly private) as well as to execute monetary policy aimed chiefly at price stability and secondarily at countering business cycles. The FED therefore manages the supply of money in the system and manipulates certain important interest rates as well.

However, the determination of what the FED does, how, when, and with whom, flows from the larger economic context. It is the capitalist economic system the set of interacting private enterprises, markets, instabilities (business cycles), and contradictions (tensions between employers and employees, between competitive and monopolized industries, small and big businesses, and so on) that shapes FED actions. I do not think it is the essential cause of what happens in that larger context. I do not think anything is such an essential cause. I refer to the present economic crisis as systemic precisely to underscore that it is the system and not one part of it that is our problem to solve by transforming it.

The FED was established early in the 20th century because of the instabilities of the private banking system - in those days they were called, appropriately enough, "bank panics." Many people then thought they could manage capitalism's costly business cycles not by changing the system but by a banking reform, establishing a central bank called the Federal Reserve System. As usually happens with reforms, the system bent the reform institution to its ways rather than the other way round. The FED has been no more effective in preventing business cycles than the system before. In other words, these cycles are a problem of the economic system - capitalism - as a whole. They are not solvable by this or that change of this or that part of the system. Getting rid of the FED will no more solve the problem of cycles than establishing the FED did.

Of course, various groups will try to capture the FED (as they do with other governmental or quasi-governmental institutions) to make them serve particular interests. They may sometimes succeed, but that too does not address or solve the bug issues, the systematic issues of a system like ours. So my focus is always to address the systemic roots of our economic and social crises and on that basis to propose systemic changes or transformations as the only realistic responses given the failures to date of the non-systematic reforms focused on establishing or disestablishing this or that institution within the system.As a matter of economic claims by monetarists, they claim that money supply is linked to inflation and there is a correlation in certain periods, but it does not always hold true. For instance, the money supply was above the increase of money and prices between 1979 and 1983 [in Thatcher's Britain] and inflation decreased, hence why Thatcher abandon this policy for supply side.

[SpiritiualMarxist]

They're mostly conspiracy theorist, the Alex Jones, Ron Paul types. Just another way the working class is duped. I don't believe most people who you'll hear saying such stuff are anti-semetic or real REAL nutjobs themselves, but it is true that its where it originated.

I actually think these people are more winnable than liberals because they already have an anti-authoritarian feel, they just lack class analysis and don't see how the real conspiracy IS capitalism, not just the banks.
One thing I heard that was interesting was the notion that if these secret societies do exist (probably do in some capacity), they are a symptom of capitalism in the first place.

[tachosomoza]

As a generality, hatred of the federal reserve is basically code for "zomg i reckon dem JEWS they be pulling da strings1!one!".

Set aside the crazies worried about lizard people and such.

Even among the more "respectable" croud you mention (perhaps only so in comparison to the batshit insane), there is a lot of mythology surrounding the federal reserve that is strikingly reminiscent of the anti-semitism of yore. Sure, there are no Christian baby bread or whatever, but their ideas of a secret cabal of basically New Yorkers, educated, crafty, vaguely non-protestant/catholic technocrat types rigging a system. They do it by controlling the money supply, putting a "non-material" value on something like gold that should be about blood and soil, not ponderous abstractions.

There is also a myth of a basically pure (i.e., anglo-saxon, christian, agrarian) American financial system that became despoiled conveniently after a massive wave of immigration from eastern europe ultimately resulted in the creation of this vast conspiracy.

A useful analogy is found in Mexico. It's kind of reminiscent of how the superstitions of pre-Columbian religions live on in the popular conception of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It's a mythology of a previous era juxtaposed to understand present realities.

Oy, this. If you start hearing someone who fits a certain profile rant and rave about the Fed, guns and government, you'd do well to run, because chances are you're going to get a screed about ZOG, Obama's birth certificate, and other batty stuff. There's enough to be pissed at the Fed for, no doubt, but the Ron Paul cultists and anarcho capitalist types tend to embrace all sorts of nasty racist garbage and anti-Semitism, along with being a little too gun crazy. Not that there's anything wrong with guns, but guns + conspiracy theorists + bigots = not friendly to leftists.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

The only loons are the people who rant on about the Federal Reserve, world banking conspiracy theory, like Alex Jones. Watch some of his videos (actually, it would be better for your brain if you don't).