mint.com— So just what is the Federal Reserve? Why was it formed in the first place? And how does its monetary policy affect the lives of everyday US citizens? Here we do our part to demystify the Federal Reserve.
May 20, 2009View in Crawl 4
Alight so I'm going to disagree with what chupavacas said here. Now as an economics major you could probably say I've been beaten with biased after sitting through one too many econ 101 classes but the federal reserve system is all and all a good development. I grew up reading smith and rand but after a few too many winded professors had their way with my head I can pretty much say with certainty that 100% pure capitalism is not an optimal system and for the most part economics is the biggest guessing game out there. There are far too many variables and any theoretical statement tries to assume way to much of how people will act. It's like social psychology with less reliable studies. That being said the federal reserve has been one of the great ideas in economic theory because it strives to balance out a few of these far too numerous variables and generally does a pretty good job, but people can be stupid and based on some of the decisions they made recently(without access to whatever info the fed has access to, so just a shot in the dark here) I have to assume like many organizations with power there is some corruption or incompetence(though that seems to be the case for a lot of things). Because of that I still feel things should be left up to the private sector for the most part, but theory alone in economics will get us no where and it's good to see where the short falls land so we can try to improve them. The federal reserve isn't broken or a mass corrupt conspiracy, it's a great idea in theory but needs to be tweaked based on experimentation and observation, which is happening(pretty damn slowly though, but so does everything in a democracy) Scientists don't throw a great theory away because they got the math wrong, they adjust. Which is what a few people much smarter then I and many as smart as I are working on and believe it or not these people are being listened to, by both parties. I'm curious to see how their ideas turn out. (hmmm I'm pretty sure I said something about the influence of winded professors in here)
alecksMay 21, 2009
Yeah, They could've achieved that same layout with some CSS. Now that page won't index.
thespiffMay 21, 2009
You mean back when the Fed was still trying to figure out how to do its job?
drybones01May 22, 2009
Alight so I'm going to disagree with what chupavacas said here. Now as an economics major you could probably say I've been beaten with biased after sitting through one too many econ 101 classes but the federal reserve system is all and all a good development. I grew up reading smith and rand but after a few too many winded professors had their way with my head I can pretty much say with certainty that 100% pure capitalism is not an optimal system and for the most part economics is the biggest guessing game out there. There are far too many variables and any theoretical statement tries to assume way to much of how people will act. It's like social psychology with less reliable studies. That being said the federal reserve has been one of the great ideas in economic theory because it strives to balance out a few of these far too numerous variables and generally does a pretty good job, but people can be stupid and based on some of the decisions they made recently(without access to whatever info the fed has access to, so just a shot in the dark here) I have to assume like many organizations with power there is some corruption or incompetence(though that seems to be the case for a lot of things). Because of that I still feel things should be left up to the private sector for the most part, but theory alone in economics will get us no where and it's good to see where the short falls land so we can try to improve them. The federal reserve isn't broken or a mass corrupt conspiracy, it's a great idea in theory but needs to be tweaked based on experimentation and observation, which is happening(pretty damn slowly though, but so does everything in a democracy) Scientists don't throw a great theory away because they got the math wrong, they adjust. Which is what a few people much smarter then I and many as smart as I are working on and believe it or not these people are being listened to, by both parties. I'm curious to see how their ideas turn out. (hmmm I'm pretty sure I said something about the influence of winded professors in here)
jerryudiggMay 22, 2009
True, how much money does the Federal Reserve give the Treasury? That should be public knowledge?
Closed AccountMay 22, 2009
Money As Debt:<a class="user" href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773770802849&amp;ei=FFwWSt7XI5S6qAPRoPCLBA&amp;q=money+as+debt&amp;hl=en">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773 ...</a>
f34rincJun 2, 2009
More like congressman Dennis Kucinich
archer007Jul 28, 2009
<a class="user" href="http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl">http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl</a> (without period)