4 July 2012 News: A New "super fed reserve" ?

[lektrode]

what do we make of this?

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-...xcerpt?cid=rss

“The New Super Federal Reserve” is an excerpt from an upcoming large-scale report titled "The Revitalization of America 2.0" by Rex Brooks, Russell Ruggiero, and Matt Harang. This is the second major effort by this writing team, and the new report is scheduled to be released sometime later this year. It touches upon a number of key topics, which directly impact the American economy and its competitiveness in the 21st Century.


The New Super Federal Reserve

Regarding the U.S. landscape, Quantitative Easing, Quantitative Easing Two (QE2), and Operation Twist are simply Federal Reserve buy back efforts circumventing the housing market from falling off a cliff and preventing the overall economy slipping back into recession. While these efforts have been very successful in holding down interest rates on instruments such as the 10 Year Treasury, along with fixed 15 and 30 year mortgages, they have not had a dramatic effect on creating new jobs. Case in point: While estimates vary (14 to 20 million unemployed), America is currently in a rough patch regarding employment. Millions are currently unemployed and million more are about to lose their unemployment benefits, which is a clear indicator of the malaise concerning this critical sector. As a result, more needs to be done in order to spur job growth and an expanded Federal Reserve or “The New Super Federal Reserve” could be up to the task. This will not be just the same old Federal Reserve, but one where the Chairman will have additional tools at their disposal to make a more profound impact on the economy.


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uh oh - do they mean even more 'profound' than the existing nightmare?

the rest:
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-...xcerpt?cid=rss

[lektrode]

Op/Ed: A More 'Perfect Union' (?) Built on Shared Debt

dunno if this is more QE propaganda, or what?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...ared-debt.html

By the Editors 2012-07-03T22:30:29Z

As Americans pause this Fourth of July to reflect on their independence, it’s worth casting a thought across the Atlantic. One story from America’s founding era, in particular, keeps reminding us of modern-day Europe.


Recall that during and after the American Revolution, public spending soared. Without the power to directly tax, the Continental Congress had to print and borrow money to meet its obligations.
Printing bills of credit led to inflation: From 1779 to 1781, prices increased nearly 10-fold. By 1790, the nation’s total outstanding debt had soared to $77.1 million, or roughly 40 percent of economic output.


Civic administration was a mess. Foreign governments held America’s IOUs -- and its leaders -- increasingly in disdain. Congress was hopelessly ineffectual. Secession was in the air.
Then, in 1788, the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving Congress the power to tax. And beginning in 1790, Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury secretary, proposed a series of solutions to tame the fiscal chaos.
Assuming Debts

He suggested funding the national debt by buying back previously issued (and now devalued) government securities at full value, using new bonds backed by credible tariff revenue. More controversially, he proposed that the federal government assume the debt burden of the states, which amounted to about a third of the nation’s total.


James Madison, Hamilton’s chief congressional adversary, was wary of both ideas. Offering face value for government debt would privilege speculators over the war veterans who had sold their devalued securities at pennies on the dollar. Assuming debts would not only force states that had paid off their obligations to bail out those that hadn’t, it would lead to encroaching federal dominion.


Madison was advancing the views of many Southerners, who feared they would soon be under the thumb of a distant and unaccountable power.


Many considered the debate over assumption itself a threat to the republic. But a bargain was haltingly reached: Congress would approve Hamilton’s funding and assumption proposal, and, to appease Madison and other skittish Southerners, the nation would eventually move its capital from New York City to a new site on the Potomac River.


It worked. The economy prospered under the deal, exports surged, and U.S. debt was brought under control. As a result, it was soon in great demand: By 1794, the U.S. had a credit rating equal to or better than any European country.


Admittedly, the analogy is inexact, but the discord in the early days of the American republic and today’s European debt crisis have some revealing similarities. In both the U.S. of 1790 and the euro area of today, provident states opposed bailing out profligate ones. States accustomed to sovereignty resented an intrusive new power. Anxious voters clamored for a clean break rather than a tighter union.


Yet, in both cases, the real choice was between deeper consolidation and catastrophe for all involved.


We’ve argued that there remains only one long-term solution to Europe’s interminable woes, and that’s a far tighter union, one that includes a fiscal authority with the power to oversee national taxing and spending plans, the issuance of bonds jointly guaranteed by all member states, and a political union to grant it legitimacy. Only with all the union’s states collectively dedicated to backing banks and sovereign debt will investors return to Europe with confidence.


Last week, European leaders took a promising step when they agreed in principle to allow the continent’s permanent bailout fund to directly recapitalize teetering banks, after establishing a banking union overseen by a supranational supervisor.


Voters haven’t exactly embraced this course. That’s why euro-area leaders must now convince them that it’s necessary: However distasteful, a closer union will avoid a chaotic break and years of turmoil. It will create a large new market in euro bonds to attract investors. And it will, ideally, begin to create a deeper European unity.


As Hamilton correctly predicted in 1781, “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our union.”

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guess that depends on what ones definition of the word 'is' is
never mind 'excessive'

[lektrode]

July 4 Op/Ed: PA, Radical Economics & Independence

some interesting POV here - COMMENTS?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...ependence.html

How Radical Economics Led to U.S. Independence

Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division



By William Hogeland 2012-07-03T16:29:17Z


Big historical events often come to seem inevitable, and little today seems more inevitable in retrospect than America’s declaring independence on July 4, 1776.


So it can be startling to recall that well into the spring and early summer of that year, the Continental Congress meeting at the State House in Philadelphia was by no means committed to declaring independence. Until the last minute, powerful men in the Congress still hoped to negotiate a settlement with England.


Even more surprising may be that without a crew of lower-class Philadelphia organizers, collaborating secretly with independence-minded gentlemen in the Congress, the declaration never would have occurred. Most outlandish of all: Those down- at-the-heels outsiders had ideas about economics and finance -- some today would call them “socialist” -- far more radically democratic than anything espoused by better-known founders.


Radical economics, in fact, was key to gaining American independence.


We often hear from historians that modern ideas about economic equality and financial fairness shouldn’t be read backward, anachronistically, into the thinking of great men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others who signed the Declaration of Independence. Almost all those men were more concerned with preserving and advancing individual liberty than with passing laws making economic life more equal. The founders took for granted and even endorsed a degree of class difference among Americans that we don’t accept today.

Economic Privilege

Most of them -- even Jefferson -- believed that people without sufficient property shouldn’t get to vote. In many states formed after independence, property qualifications prevailed for voting, with even higher qualifications for holding office. To the famous founders, wise political leadership was equated with economic privilege.


But there were other thinkers on economics and finance in founding-era America who took another view. In Philadelphia, outsiders such as Thomas Young, James Cannon, Christopher Marshall, Timothy Matlack, and Thomas Paine (the only one well known to us) formed a group dedicated to gaining political participation for landless laborers, lower artisans, tenant farmers and others whom upscale revolutionary leaders had barred from representative government.


The radicals’ goal in seeking poor and working-class access to the franchise was to legislate economic fairness. Some of what they wanted will sound familiar from our own debates about finance: debt relief, easier credit for working people, an end to widespread foreclosure and progressive taxation. To those radicals, independence looked like a chance to make their ideas into realities.


In the spring and early summer of 1776, coordinated largely by John Adams’s older second cousin Samuel Adams, a secret coalition -- upscale gentlemen in the Congress, lower-class insurgents outdoors -- disabled the elected government of Pennsylvania, the Congress’s host, led by the most powerful politician in the country, John Dickinson. Pennsylvania was so strategically and economically important -- already the “Keystone State” -- that without its support, independence couldn’t be declared. And although he was a committed patriot, Dickinson firmly opposed independence.

The Coup

(or perhaps the earliest version of occupy wall st?)

So while John Adams battered Pennsylvania in the Congress with resolutions and preambles, the radicals outdoors organized the whole state’s working class. The coup, when it came, was military but bloodless. The rank and file of the state’s militia -- the privates, with the officers following their men -- supported by Adams’s resolutions in the Congress, refused to take further orders from Dickinson’s Pennsylvania assembly.


Their reason? As unpropertied and less-propertied men, they were, they said, “not represented in that house.” That was a radical idea about the basis of representative rights. And although John Adams, for one, collaborated with the men who advanced it, he certainly didn’t share it.

(the more things change, the more they stay the same...)


Of course, we know how the larger story went. On July 2, with Dickinson now impotent, the Congress adopted a resolution for independence. Two days later, it issued the famous Declaration. Celebrating with hot dogs came much later.


But there was another climax in the summer of 1776, less well-known but especially relevant to our current economic debate. The Pennsylvania radicals wrote a new constitution for their state, in which voting wasn’t qualified by property. Nor was holding office. For the first time, laborers, tenant farmers and others without financial privilege could take full part in government.


Some of the radicals’ economic hopes were surprisingly extreme. Some pushed for a provision in the state constitution limiting how much property any one person could own. That didn’t pass, but assemblies elected under the new Pennsylvania constitution began working on such things as price controls, devaluation of public debt and progressive taxes. They removed a bank charter on the grounds that it served only high financiers, not the whole people.


“Good God!” John Adams said when he read the Pennsylvania constitution. He wanted nothing to do with the radical economics he had helped enable. Yet without that radicalism, and without the Adamses’ collaboration with it, America wouldn’t have declared independence on July 4, 1776.


(William Hogeland is the author of “Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks That Made America Independent” and the forthcoming “Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

VERY interesting...

[don]

Re: July 4 Op/Ed: PA, Radical Economics & Independence

Will there be a Super Movie Tie-in?

Can America's sheeple buy it without tights?

Things we need to know.

[lektrode]

Re: July 4 Op/Ed: PA, Radical Economics & Independence

Can America's sheeple buy it without tights?

maybe - probably need a whig tho...

[lektrode]

Re: 4 July 2012 News: A New "super fed reserve" ?

what - NO COMMENTS on this one?
would seem to be a fairly significant development....

what do we make of this?

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-...xcerpt?cid=rss

“The New Super Federal Reserve” is an excerpt from an upcoming large-scale report titled "The Revitalization of America 2.0" by Rex Brooks, Russell Ruggiero, and Matt Harang. This is the second major effort by this writing team, and the new report is scheduled to be released sometime later this year. It touches upon a number of key topics, which directly impact the American economy and its competitiveness in the 21st Century.


The New Super Federal Reserve

Regarding the U.S. landscape, Quantitative Easing, Quantitative Easing Two (QE2), and Operation Twist are simply Federal Reserve buy back efforts circumventing the housing market from falling off a cliff and preventing the overall economy slipping back into recession. While these efforts have been very successful in holding down interest rates on instruments such as the 10 Year Treasury, along with fixed 15 and 30 year mortgages, they have not had a dramatic effect on creating new jobs. Case in point: While estimates vary (14 to 20 million unemployed), America is currently in a rough patch regarding employment. Millions are currently unemployed and million more are about to lose their unemployment benefits, which is a clear indicator of the malaise concerning this critical sector. As a result, more needs to be done in order to spur job growth and an expanded Federal Reserve or “The New Super Federal Reserve” could be up to the task. This will not be just the same old Federal Reserve, but one where the Chairman will have additional tools at their disposal to make a more profound impact on the economy.


-------

uh oh - do they mean even more 'profound' than the existing nightmare?

the rest:
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-...xcerpt?cid=rss