The Federal Reserve Is Directly Monetizing US Debt
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by Chris Martenson
The Federal Reserve is now directly monetizing US federal debt, and it’s using several technical jinks to offer a pretense that things are otherwise.
But it’s not difficult to predict what’s going to happen next: The Fed will drop the secrecy and start buying US debt openly at a time when US fiscal deficits are exploding, and foreign buyers are heading for the exits.
Martenson discusses how it will work; what’s actually happening; data points one and two; and MMT. He notes that this is an important conversation to have, but it’s not being had at all.
During Fed Chair Jay Powell’s last news conference, he was not asked a single question on this topic. Nobody asked about the extreme and accelerating wealth and income gaps, both direct outcomes of the Fed’s policies.
Nobody expressed concern about the Fed’s secretive actions, its direct debt monetization, or its violation of the Federal Reserve Act.
The US media is toothless. Today’s journalists must be too afraid of losing their jobs to speak truth to power, and have slipped into quiet acceptance of a mere stenographer’s role.
You’d think, given the enormous troubles that tend to follow central bank debt monetization, that there’d be some curiosity on the topic, but no. No pushback from the media or Congress, direct or tangential.
Meanwhile the Fed has tossed a mind-boggling $285 billion of permanent new money into the markets over the past couple of months, and is conducting daily operations that put additional tens of billions of dollars of short-term money into the markets as well, all while claiming everything is fine.
Sure doesn’t feel that way, does it?