Friday, February 26, 2016

A Blast from the Past -- C-SPAN Debate Panel on the US Federal Reserve

Recently we featured an interview here on the blog with Dr. Warren Coats. Dr. Coats had a long career at the IMF and is regarded as a leading expert in the world on monetary systems having consulted with many central banks in establishing currencies over the years. 

I happened to discover a fascinating debate that was covered on C-SPAN back in 2009 on whether or not the US Federal Reserve should be abolished. Dr. Coats was one of the four panelists who participated in this debate. He and another panelist argued the position that the Fed should not be abolished. It is a lengthy debate (there are six YouTube segments that cover it) but well worth your time if you have interest in the issues we cover here. There is a lot of good discussion and debate and you will be better informed if you take time to listen regardless of which side you may agree with. 

Below is the video for the first segment. You can watch that and the find the other segments on YouTube or just go directly to the links further below to see the whole debate.
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Above is the first segment, below are links to the other five segments






Added comments: This topic has kind of been set aside since 2009 because we have managed to avoid another major financial crisis so far and therefore public concern has quieted down somewhat. However, as we can see from the current US political environment, there is still a lot of discontent lurking beneath the surface about how things are being run. Bernie Sanders campaign is being fueled by a lot of people with significant distrust in the current banking system including the US Federal Reserve. 

Interestingly, supporters of people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz share similar distrust in the banking system even as they completely disagree on the role of government etc. with followers of Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump supporters seem to be just distrustful of everything about the current system and think it is being poorly administered. The point being that we can see that a majority of voters this year are unhappy with the status quo and those running it. Just imagine how they are going to feel if they get blindsided by another major financial crisis worse than 2008 like Jim Rickards is expecting. 

What I see in doing research for this blog is that the US Fed is really setup to take the fall for another big crisis if we do get one. Both political parties are likely to jump on them along with perhaps the IMF and the BIS. We can therefore assume they will move heaven and earth to try and prevent one, especially during the 2016 election year.

Even though this debate on the Fed was held way back in 2009, it covers a lot of issues that could quickly resurface in the public mind if we do get another major crisis any time soon. I found this to be a very interesting and informative debate and well worth the time to listen to. 

Added note: While this debate was about whether or not to abolish the Federal Reserve, these days we have Federal Reserve Presidents calling for the breakup of big banks here and here.
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Note to Readers

On Friday March 4th we will publish an important new presentation on the future role of SDRs done by a current and former IMF official that are experts on this topic. Dr. Warren Coats who we have interviewed here on the blog is one of the speakers and he provided us a quote for our article that readers will want to see.

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