You understand the system perfectly, shame you have few posts from the time you joined. I say get involved more, we have a lot shills for the other side.
No. You are placing everything into the giant "government" box: military, administration, policy, planning, benefits, entitlements, governance, laws, and currency and economic management into the "government" box. It needs to be distributed. Competition in banks is necessary. Please read Promise Language. It breaks apart the constituent parts of "money" and provides the solution. The solution is simple and viable and doable. Today.
The first fact may be technically wrong. I believe even the Branch banks are technically owned by the Fed, but the member banks are required to buy stock which pays , the last time i looked, a 6% dividend. However the stock, unlike stock in publicly held corporations, imparts no ownership rights. Private, Reserve Member Banks do have officers serving on the boards of the Branch banks. Some have expressed the opinion that this creates a conflict of interest. For other than conspiracy theorists, the best source of information about the structure of the Federal Reserve is Federal Reserve.gov , note that it is dot gov, not dot com. I don't think there is any doubt about the Mother Bank being lock, stock, and barrel U.S. government issue. The Federal Reserve is fully a creature of Congress and works hand and glove with the Treasury. The intention was to isolate it from political tampering. There is abundant, circumstantial evidence that that intention has not been fully realized.
I wanted to comment on a related issue. We have heard the Fed's creation of new money via the QE programs referred to as "printing". In a formal hearing Bernanke was asked indirectly if he was "printing" money. He said :"We are not printing", and he left it at that. I think confusion arises because technically to most economists "printing" means just that, i.e. creating money out of thin air and using it to pay on debt. (Exactly what Zimbabwe did!) However the U.S. is not "printing" in that sense. Each new dollar created via QE is attached to new debt. So in effect the U.S. is borrowing, not printing. I think now, Bernanke's answer was correct, though I was puzzled by it at the time. I still hear the term "printing" used. I heard it yesterday morning on NPR. I think it is, in most cases, from the economists viewpoint, being used incorrectly.
Once upon a time the Treasury had gold (and other real assets). When the Fed was created, the Treasury used their assets as collateral to borrow money from the Fed. The Fed looked at the income and expenses of the Treasury and Congress and government and lent them money in defined increments. To maintain cashflow, the Fed sold the bonds to the public or institutions. So the Fed was a trading house and made a market on both the bid and the ask. Their inventory came from the Treasury. Economists and analysts were hired to predict the economy so as to make sound lending decisions. Their only customer to lend to was the Treasury. Since then, the Treasury lost their collateral, and the Fed kept on lending. The Fed then looked at the future income based on tax revenue and lent them money based on that. Nowadays, the debt ceiling is the maximum amount Congress allows the Treasury to sell (or the Fed to buy). That should probably be called the yearly inflation amount rather than the debt ceiling. It is no longer "once upon a time". Today, the Fed conveys nothing but a funny check to the Treasury. Consumers call that "check kiting". Because they are the Fed, no one catches them and they use open market operations to hide the fact that the Fed is creating money to the total amount of the debt ceiling. So, taxes must make both the interest and principal payments. This has turned it into a slavery system. The Fed broke their promise. If they were still running their business, they would have stopped lending a long time ago. But. Now they have buyers in the form of the public and institutions who purchase the bonds and create derivatives using them as collateral. Everyone is betting on the future tax revenue. And the fact that the Congress keeps raising the debt ceiling. The Fed has a fraudulent journal entry. For those who remember accounting, what is the offsetting asset or liability that the Fed credits when they accept the bond asset on their books. Note, if you say cash, is that cash from open market operations?
Thank you Hello for your insight. I will go back and read your longer posts when I get a spare moment. Too tired right now to think clearly.
Oh no, central banks (these evil corporations) know EXACTLY what they are doing. The FED is NOT part of the government, it's a private bank, period, just like FEDERAL EXPRESS is a private company. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe0fGXzKb1o