LAS VEGAS – Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul unveiled his economic “Plan to Restore America” in Las Vegas Monday afternoon, calling for a lower corporate tax rate, a cut in spending by $1 trillion during his first year in office and the elimination of five cabinet-level agencies.”

[…]

Paul does get specific when he calls for a 10 percent reduction in the federal work force, while pledging to limit his presidential salary to $39,336, which his campaign says is “approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.” The current pay rate for commander in chief is $400,000 a year.

Based on Dr. Paul’s speech, there’s not a whole lot not to like. Cutting $1 trillion of government spending in the first year would be a very good thing IMO.

As a Gary Johnson supporter, I can’t help but get more than a little annoyed each time one of Paul’s supporters, member of his campaign staff, or the congressman himself makes the claim that Dr. Paul is the only candidate in the race who would balance the budget. Gov. Johnson has promised a balanced budget, not merely in his first term but in his first budget in virtually every debate, interview, and speech he has given since he announced his candidacy.

That criticism aside, I hope this plan is given serious consideration by the primary voters and debated among the candidates.

Yeah, there goes crazy Uncle Ron again with these crazy misquotes he picked up off the internet!

I’m not sure if the crowd was laughing at Cain or Paul at this point but it wasn’t that difficult to find audio of his “misquotes” on YouTube from when he was guest hosting The Neal Boortz Show.

But this wasn’t the first time Cain has been busted on a flip-flop followed by an accusation that he was misquoted or received “misinformation”. The next example: Cain changes his mind as to whether the president can target an American citizen for assassination without due process.

The Flip:

The Flop:

I never said that [President Obama] should not have ordered [the killing]. I don’t recall saying that. I think you’ve got some misinformation. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there trying to make me sound as if I am indecisive.

I don’t know all of the compelling evidence that the intelligence agencies and the military had. I’m convinced — I’m convinced that they have enough intelligence information that said he’s a threat to the United States of America. You don’t try to prosecute or capture him simply because he’s a United States citizen.

What will he say when he is confronted with these audio and video clips? Would he have us believe that these were imposters?

If Cain would have said on either of these issues “You know, I after thinking about it a little more, I was wrong…” I might be able to respect that. But to accuse people who challenge him of misquoting him when it’s so easy to prove otherwise is disturbing to say the least.

To understand the meaning of this, we should first understand the meaning of the S&P ratings.

The ratings indicate several things:
1) The likelihood of a default – the debtor failing to make interest payments owed to the people who purchased the bonds.

2) The likelihood that the bond holders will recover some of their losses after a default.

3) How quickly the debtor’s financial condition could deteriorate causing them to slide into default.

In the pdf explaining their rating system, S&P has a very interesting table showing the default rate associated with organizations based on their classification. As one would expect, in the past thirty years no AAA organization has defaulted, nor has any organization that is rated AA+.

In their press release explaining the downgrade, S&P makes the following points:

• The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
• More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
• Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics any time soon.
• The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case
• The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short ofwhat, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’smedium-term debt dynamics.
• More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness,stability, and predictability of American policy making and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned anegative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
• Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics anytime soon.
• The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower thelong-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that lessr eduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or newfiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general governmentdebt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

In essence, the S&P rating agency is implying that since the recent debate about raising the debt ceiling was immaturely handled, they are now more pessimistic than they were this spring. This strikes me as and excuse to give plausible deniability to the accusation that for years they have been rating the U.S. government much more favorably than is appropriate by any objective manner.

The fact is that over the past few decades, the U.S. government’s long-term fiscal condition has been steadily eroding, and the legislature has shown no willingness to seriously tackle the issue.  Unsurprisingly any legislator who broaches the topic of reducing any of the major sources of spending, medicare, social security, millitary spending,  corporate subsidies, etc risks being voted out of office by an electorate whipped into a frenzy about an attack on the elderly, the poor, our allies, etc.

The rating agencies, having been granted a monopoly on ratings by the U.S. government, have been loath to bite the hand that feeds them, to risk the wrath of the legislature by frankly describing the terrible financial outlook for the U.S. government. At this point the AAA rating has become a joke; there is no way that the U.S. government can pay back the loans. There is no ideological chasm between the Republicans and the Democrats.  Both parties support massive welfare spending, high taxes, and massive plundering of the productive bits of the economy.  I am increasingly of the opinion that the debt fight was a kabuki theatre engaged in by the Democrats and the Republican leadership in order to end the Tea Party threat to the metastasizing state.  The Teaparty were the grownups announcing that the party has to stop, and the political parties’ leadership were the petulant teenagers plotting to keep things going a little longer.

At this point U.S. government bonds are a very bad thing to buy. The interest the U.S. government is offering is pathetically low.  Inevitably, to attract buyers, the government will have to raise the interest rate. Once they do this, prices in the secondary market for the older low-yield bonds will collapse.  The interest payments needed to service the outstanding debt will increase, and the U.S. government will be in even worse financial shape.  It’s possible that the Federal Reserve will buy the bonds itself, using newly printed dollars, much like the central bank of Zimbabwe.

Unfortunately too many retirees have invested in U.S. government bonds, expecting that the income from the bonds would provide a reliable, dependable source of income. Either they will be screwed by the inevitable default, or they will find their income’s purchasing power destroyed by inflation.

United States Constitution
Article 1, Section 7


All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

The issuance of debt is a revenue raising measure. The “debt ceiling” is, in fact, legislation initiated in the House of Representatives, which authorizes the executive branch to issue debt through the treasury (and by extension the federal reserve), up to a specific limit.

This “debt ceiling” and authorization of debt issuance; allows the executive branch to raise revenue in a constitutionally legitimate way; because the revenue is raised under the auspices of specific authorization by the house or representatives.

Neither the Senate, nor the House, acting separately or together; has the authority or ability to delegate this exclusive power of the house, to any other entity, including the president. In fact, it would be a clear violation of the principle of separation of powers to do so.

That is all.

But what if I told you that there was another $11T of outstanding US dollars* out there in the world, and that everyone except the US has a say in whether they are circulated. In fact, that those dollars are sitting on foreign soil is a very good thing for the US and has been for decades, but it’s not assured it will last forever. As I said WAAAY back in 2007:

As I’ve pointed out in the past, the dollar’s status as a reserve currency has largely allowed America to inflate with very little visible burden on our own citizens. We create worthless money, use it to buy durable goods from other countries, and watch as they hold that money or reinvest it in the sinkhole that are Treasury bonds. It’s a credit card on the world, and we can print whatever we need to pay it off…

…as long as they don’t wise up. If they do, suddenly that money might come back to us, and we’ll feel the results of the inflation we’ve engaged upon.

Inflation benefits those who see the money first — in this case, Americans who used that money to buy durable goods from overseas. It has the least benefit for those who see the money last. To date, that has been forex reserves, sovereign wealth funds, etc. But should those foreign nations decide they no longer want to hold US dollars, they’ll spend them right back into circulation — and they’ll eventually want us to sell them goods in exchange for those dollars.

If that happens, the inflation comes full circle and we feel it right here at home — without the Fed ever releasing the $2.7T they have on their balance sheet.

We’ve spent the last four decades, ever since Nixon “closed the gold window”, sending dollars abroad to other nations who stick them under their mattresses. This has been the persistent trade deficit we’ve held. Sure, some of those dollars came back to be lent to our own government to finance even MORE spending that didn’t come from the American people, but much of them quite literally got shoved under the mattress.

What happens if they want to spend those dollars? Well, dollar-denominated assets and goods produced in the US will rise in price. Oil, gold, silver, food (produced in the US), etc. Look at gold, for example: In the last year, gold has increased in dollar terms by over 32%, but by less than 8% in Swiss francs. USD vs other currencies show similar (but smaller) gaps. What can explain this? Well, if nothing else, that big buyers like China and India are using their dollar surplus, rather than their reserves in other currencies, to buy gold.

Where’s the endgame if this dollar-spending widens? Well, eventually those dollars are sold to people who don’t want to buy goods from China or US T-Bills: they want to buy US exports or US assets. That sounds good, of course; everyone likes exports! But is it good? Restate it this way: a durable good (i.e. product of American workers’ output) needs to be produced to leave our shores, and it increases the circulating money supply in the USA. The good we produce here is enjoyed elsewhere, while the increased money supply makes our own goods at home more expensive.

We change from trading our paper for other nations’ hard work to trading our hard work for our own paper back.

The endgame is the end of trade deficits, where we work harder as a nation to supply the rest of the world with goods in exchange for a lower standard of living here. That doesn’t sound good to me at all.

America has enjoyed a very privileged position in the world, and that position has only been possible from two things: other nations have trusted us and they’ve had no other options. The first is eroding to the point where they’re looking for the second. If we want to continue enjoying our position in the world, we need to convince the rest of the world that holding the US Dollar as a reserve currency benefits them — and neither trillion Dollar deficits as far as the eye can see or quantitative easing accomplish that.

When the inflation comes, it’s not going to be the Fed printing money — it’s going to be other nations sending us the money printed over four decades and expecting to buy something with it.

* Difficult stat to come up with. I used wikipedia to determine that there’s ~11T total forex reserves and about 61% of them are USD, which gives me about $6.7T in USD sitting in forex reserves. Add to that about $4.4T foreign holdings of US treasury securities, and I came up with a total number of about $11T.

…but it appears that the US Attorney doesn’t agree. She seems to think this is a lot more important than the rest of us… And what she says here [on the FBI press release, no less] is chilling:

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Tompkins said in announcing the verdict. “While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” she added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.”

Really, Anne? Really? You’re going to throw around terms like “domestic terrorism” over this? For as much as I disagree with what von Nothaus was doing — profiting off of those who feel your fiat currency, backed by nothing more than a promise, is on the verge of a potential collapse — he wouldn’t have such a big market to sell to if the Fed wasn’t doing everything in its power to undermine the legitimacy of the US Dollar every day.

Every day the government’s inflationary policies erode the value of the US Dollar, stealing the wealth of people who have worked their butts off to earn those Dollars. While I think what von Nothaus was doing was fraudulent, I think I’m beginning to agree with those who have used the old adage to explain why you chose to go after him: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.”

Let me state, first and foremost, that I am not a fan of the Federal Reserve, or of fiat money. I fully support the right of the people of the US to use and circulate alternative currencies. I enjoy the fact that some of those currencies would be backed by precious metals. But I incurred quite a firestorm of comments here after the raid, when I explained that I thought the government was right. While I support alternative currencies, and would love the Liberty Dollar to have been one, I claimed it was NOT an alternative currency:

A competing currency must not be interchangeable with FRN’s, which is the fiction that the Liberty Dollar creators try to uphold. Thus, the ALD becomes a method for them to sell silver at a profit while their associates or merchants work to defraud businesses by offering silver worth less (in FRN terms) for goods that are priced in FRN terms. At each level, it appears to have a cut of profit, as all multi-level marketing schemes do, and at the bottom of the scale, those who receive ALD’s as a “face value” equivalent to FRN’s are being shafted.

The Liberty Dollar does not seem to live up to what is bills itself as. If it were a true competing currency, merchants would price goods in ALD terms higher than in FRN terms, in order to receive identical value for their wares. If it were a true competing currency, the “exchange rate” between ALD’s and FRN’s would float, rather than be defined by the Liberty Dollar creators. I previously have written favorably about the Liberty Dollar, but given new information, I have changed my mind. It does not fit the bill of an alternative currency; it is a scam.

After three years of legal wrangling, it was announced today that the founder of the Liberty Dollar, Bernard von Nothaus, has been convicted on all four counts.

The crux of the government’s case rests pretty much on this, care of Coin World magazine [emphasis added]:

The federal government alleges that Von NotHaus, with three other defendants, worked together to violate the law by making Liberty Dollars the government characterizes as “coins” of silver “intended for use as current money” and “in resemblance of genuine coins of the United States …”

…

U.S. Assistant Prosecutor Craig Morenao, in opening statements, said the government would set out to prove that von NotHaus deliberately told people to give Liberty Dollars as change for Federal Reserve notes, in direct violation of laws that specifically prohibit the use of passing originally designed coins as current money.

It seems pretty clear that this is not counterfeiting in the *traditional* sense, where you try to copy the direct design. But given that everything I had seen from the website, marketing materials, etc suggested that the ALD should be spent at parity with federal reserve notes, and given to vendors in place of or given to consumers as change in place of federal reserve notes is problematic. Creating a currency to be spent alongside in competition with the US Dollar is one thing — creating a currency to be spent as a US Dollar equivalent is another.

I feel moderately bad for those who got sucked in to the Liberty Dollar system. But overall, I feel worse for anyone who would have the goal to create a *true* alternative currency, because the actions of Bernard von Nothaus have given the very concept a bad name, and imbued the idea of alternative currencies with fear of government prosecution. All this for what was just a scam to get rich fleecing people who distrust government fiat money.

Hat Tip: Reason

Well, that has changed, as represented by yields:

The bond market is saying that it’s safer to lend to Warren Buffett than Barack Obama.

When it’s “safer” to lend to a corporate businessman who can’t print his own currency or extort his subjects citizens for more tax dollars, you know something serious is going down.

Berkshire Hathaway, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, and Lowe’s are all trading below similar maturity US T-bills, a situation the linked article calls “exceedingly rare”.

But don’t worry, mere citizen. I’m sure Obama’s working on an individual mandate to get you to “do your part” and invest in Treasury bonds.

Hat Tip: QandO

UPDATE: Looks like yields are continuing to rise.

Unlike libertarians, most conservatives simply don’t want small government. They want their own version of big government. Of course, they have done a pretty good job of fooling American voters for decades by repeating the phrases “limited government” and “small government” like a hypnotic chant.

It’s interesting that conservatives only notice “big government” when it’s something their political enemies want. When conservatives want it, apparently it doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants a trillion-dollar foreign war, that doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants a 700-billion-dollar bank bailout, that doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants to spend billions fighting a needless and destructive War on Drugs, that doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants to spend billions building border fences, that doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants to “protect” the huge, unjust, and terribly inefficient Social Security and Medicare programs, that doesn’t count.

- If a conservative wants billions in farm subsidies, that doesn’t count.

It’s truly amazing how many things “don’t count.”

Benedict went on to point out the lack of concern these same people had with the government expansion of President Bush and the health care mandates of another CPAC favorite – Mitt Romney.

While I’m by no means a supporter of the Obama Administration, the idea that many Conservatives seem to have that all the problems we are faced with started on January 20, 2009 is completely ludicrous**.

These are the same people who would gladly support Sarah ‘the Quitter’ Palin, ‘Mandate’ Mitt Romney, or ‘Tax Hike Mike’ Huckabee – none are what I would call ‘limited government’ by any stretch of the imagination.

*And even the anarchists among us who oppose all government regardless of size

**Ditto for those Bush haters of the left who believes every problem we face now began 8 years prior. If we are honest, the problems we face today go back at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson (and probably even before him)

Enjoy.

from RJ Matson, NY Observer

Hat Tip: Ritholtz, The Big Picture

When Ludwig von Mises first arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi Europe, and pretty much up until the present day, he was essentially ignored by the mainstream economics community in the United States. It was only through the assistance of American businessmen that he was able to get a job teaching at New York University, and, even then, the work he did had nothing to do with official university activities because he was, effectively, shunned for his uncompromising defense of the free-market.

Earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal, though, Mises is given credit for being one of the few economists in the 1920s to foresee the impending Great Depression:

Mises’s ideas on business cycles were spelled out in his 1912 tome “Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel” (“The Theory of Money and Credit”). Not surprisingly few people noticed, as it was published only in German and wasn’t exactly a beach read at that.

Taking his cue from David Hume and David Ricardo, Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.

Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our “time preferences,” or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.

Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse.

The system is dramatically susceptible to errors, both on the policy side and on the entrepreneurial side. Government expansion of credit takes a system otherwise capable of adjustment and resilience and transforms it into one with tremendous cyclical volatility.

(…)

We all know what happened next. Pretty much right out of Mises’s script, overleveraged banks (including Kreditanstalt) collapsed, businesses collapsed, employment collapsed. The brittle tree snapped. Following Mises’s logic, was this a failure of capitalism, or a failure of hubris?

Mises’s solution follows logically from his warnings. You can’t fix what’s broken by breaking it yet again. Stop the credit gavage. Stop inflating. Don’t encourage consumption, but rather encourage saving and the repayment of debt. Let all the lame businesses fail—no bailouts. (You see where I’m going with this.) The distortions must be removed or else the precipice from which the system will inevitably fall will simply grow higher and higher.

That was Mises’ argument in The Theory Of Money And Credit, but he did so much more than that. In Socialism, first published in 1921, Mises laid out in detail the reasons why the centrally planned economy of nations like the USSR could never produce a rational economy and were doomed to failure. He was, of course, proven right in that regard as we learned only twenty years ago. Mises’ magnum opus is Human Action: A Treatise on Economics and while it’s not easy reading it is well worth consuming for even the amateur student of economics.

Here’s hoping people will start taking Mises’ lessons to heart before we make the same mistakes all over again.

I believe that all citizens should become involved in the legislative process by letting their voices be heard, and I appreciate the time and effort that you took to share your thoughts with me. One of the most important aspects of my job is keeping informed about the views of my constituents, and I welcome your comments so that I may continue to represent California to the best of my ability. Should I have the opportunity to consider legislation on this or similar issues, I will keep your views in mind.

Great… You thank me for sharing my thoughts. I feel empowered!

What you don’t say is anything whatsoever regarding your opinion on the legislation (at least Feinstein gave me *something*). So how do I interpret your letter?

‘I’m gonna put my finger up in the air and see which way the wind blows, because I have a vulnerable seat in 2010 and I don’t want to piss anyone off. If I see any benefit to myself, I might at some point take a position on this legislation.’

So, today, when I was reading United Liberty, I was reminded of S.604, and decided to check to see if there were any surprises. And to my astonishment, there was! Barbara Boxer actually co-sponsored S.604!!

Do I think she’s really all that interested in an audit of the Federal Reserve? Not from the email response I received. But hey, she knows a populist wave when she sees one, and she’s gonna ride this one to Nov 2010.

There are a lot of forces assembling behind the Audit the Fed movement. Those forces are having traction. Enough traction, in fact, to get a California Democratic Senator to fall into line. It may be a political calculation, but if someone like Boxer has to make that calculation, it proves that there’s actually some real mojo here. Congratulations are due to Ron Paul, because without his tireless work in the House, we wouldn’t be this close to a serious review of what goes on at the Fed.

Letter from Boxer:

Dear Mr. Warbiany:

Thank you for contacting my office to express your views on S.604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, which would require the Comptroller General to conduct an audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and its banks before the end of 2010 and to report its detailed findings to Congress.

I believe that all citizens should become involved in the legislative process by letting their voices be heard, and I appreciate the time and effort that you took to share your thoughts with me. One of the most important aspects of my job is keeping informed about the views of my constituents, and I welcome your comments so that I may continue to represent California to the best of my ability. Should I have the opportunity to consider legislation on this or similar issues, I will keep your views in mind.

For additional information about my activities in the U.S. Senate, please visit my website, http://boxer.senate.gov. From this site, you can access statements and press releases that I have issued about current events and pending legislation, request copies of legislation and government reports, and receive detailed information about the many services that I am privileged to provide for my constituents. You may also wish to visit http://thomas.loc.gov to track current and past legislation.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I appreciate hearing from you.

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

Letter from Feinstein:

Dear Mr. Warbiany:

Thank you for contacting me to express support for legislation to increase transparency at the Federal Reserve. I appreciate your interest in monetary policy and welcome the opportunity to respond.

The Federal Reserve was originally established in response to the country’s need for a sound and independent central bank to manage decisions relating to U.S. monetary policy. I understand your concern with some of the unprecedented steps that the Federal Reserve has taken recently to ease the flow of credit and stabilize financial markets.

On March 16, 2009, Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT) introduced the “Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009″ (S. 604), which would require the U.S. Comptroller General to audit the Federal Reserve System before the end of 2010. This bill has been referred to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) has introduced a similar bill (H.R. 1207) in the House of Representatives. Please know that I will keep your support for this legislation in mind should it come before the full Senate.

While I recognize the importance of accountability in the operations of the Federal Reserve, I strongly believe that monetary decisions should be made independent of political influence or motives. You may be interested to learn that I supported an amendment to the Congressional Budget Resolution (S. Con. Res. 13) offered by Senator Sanders requiring the Federal Reserve to disclose how it has disbursed emergency economic assistance to financial institutions during this severe economic crisis. Be assured that I am carefully monitoring the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to help stimulate our economy and unfreeze credit for businesses and homeowners.

Once again, thank you for writing. I hope that you will continue to share your views with me. If I can be of any further assistance, please contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.

Sincerely yours, Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

Particularly irksome when we’re talking about an audit is the fact that they’ve just admitted to engaging in gold swaps, influencing the gold price, in opposition to past denials and with the assertion that they should be able to continue hiding the specifics:

The Federal Reserve System has disclosed to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. that it has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that it does not want the public to know about.

The disclosure, GATA says, contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.

The Fed’s disclosure came this week in a letter to GATA’s Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia (http://www.lawandfreedom.com/), denying GATA’s administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks. (See the International Monetary Fund’s treatise on gold swaps here: http://www.imf.org/external/bopage/pdf/99-10.pdf.)

Gold has been flirting with the $1000/oz level for several weeks (topping it a few times). Those in the gold market have long believed that central banks are suppressing the price to keep fears of inflation from hitting the roof.

How much longer do we have to allow the fed to lie to us, and then when we catch them red-handed, assert that they know well enough that we have to let them hide details on top of their lies?

I say we audit the fed. Then End The Fed.

And yet, there was budget director Peter Orszag rushing to a lunch with Chinese bureaucrats on a Monday in late July. To his surprise, when Orszag arrived at the site of the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the Chinese didn’t dwell on the Wall Street meltdown or the global recession. The bureaucrats at his table mostly wanted to know about health care reform, which Orszag has helped shepherd. “They were intrigued by the most recent legislative developments,” Orszag says. “It was like, ‘You’re fresh from the field, what can you tell us?’?”

As it happens, health care is much on the minds of the Chinese these days. Over the last few years, as China has become the world’s largest purchaser of Treasury bonds, the government has grown increasingly sophisticated in its understanding of U.S. budget deficits. The issue has become all the more pressing in recent months, as the financial crisis and recession pushed the deficit to record levels. With nearly half of their $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves invested in U.S. bonds alone, the Chinese are understandably concerned about our creditworthiness. And this concern has brought them ineluctably to the issue of health care. “At some point, if you refuse to contain health care costs, you’ll go bankrupt,” says Andy Xie, a prominent Shanghai-based economist, formerly of Morgan Stanley. “It’s widely known among [Chinese] policymakers.” Xie himself wrote a much-read piece on the subject in 2007 for Caijing magazine–kind of the Chinese version of Fortune.

The Chinese, unfortunately for them, have worked their way into a suicide pact with America. They are simply too heavily invested here to see any serious problems with our economy, government, or monetary base. Had they not spent the last decade buying up enormous Treasury holdings, they could let us implode our economy and “fix” our debt/spending issues through debasing our currency, and then swoop in to buy assets on the cheap once we hit bottom. But that’s not on the agenda. If we take the low road, we’re towing them along for the ride.

Obama says he won’t accept a bill that adds to the deficit. I don’t believe him, since I’ve already seen him fail to live up to his promises on taxes and legislative transparency. Even worse, though, he’s got the folks who plan to finance that deficit worried. And the last group you want to scare are the ones you’re trying to get to lend you money.

Hat Tip: Ezra Klein