How The Fed Has Failed America, Part 2

The only way to eliminate the financial parasites is to stop subsidizing their skimming and scamming, and the only way to stop subsidizing the financial parasites is to shut down the Fed.

Before I explain how the Federal Reserve has failed America, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that instead of creating $3.2 trillion and giving it to the banking sector to play with--funding carry trades and high-frequency trading, for example--the Fed had invested in carry trades itself and returned the profits directly to taxpayers.

Before we go through the math, let's recall how a carry trade works: Financiers borrow billions at near-zero interest from the Fed and then use the free money to buy bonds in other countries where the return is (say) 5%. The financiers are skimming 4.75% or more for doing nothing other than having access to the Fed's free money.

If the bonds rise in value (because interest rates decline in the nation issuing the bonds), the financiers skim additional profit. If the trade can be leveraged via derivatives, then the annual return can be bumped up from 5% to 10%.

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