The Fed: A Never-Ending Rip-Off Conducted in Secrecy

Eliot Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’:

The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.

The war being waged on the TARP watchdog's independence:

Neil Barofsky, the chief watchdog over the $700 billion TARP bank bailout program, is one of those rare creatures in Washington: he takes very seriously his responsibilities of independent oversight and accountability. (snip) But ever since he was appointed to head the oversight office created by Congress when it enacted TARP -- an office designed to ensure transparency and accountability at the Treasury Department and in the banking industry -- he has repeatedly clashed with Obama's Treasury officials over their lack of transparency in how the trillions of dollars in TARP-related funds are being sent to and used by the banking industry. (snip) Last week, he issued a report documenting that the actual amount of taxpayer money theoretically put at risk in the bank bailout -- once Federal Reserve, FDIC and other programs are counted -- is $23.7 trillion, not the widely cited figure of $700 billion, a report that prompted attacks from the White House and Treasury on his credibility. Separately, Barofsky has continuously disputed White House claims that it's impossible to account for what has been done by banks with the TARP funds. (snip)

Most significant of all, and obviously due to Barofsky's truly independent oversight efforts, the Obama administration is now attempting to induce the Justice Department to issue a ruling that Barofsky's office is not independent at all -- but rather, is subject to, and under the supervision of, the authority of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. By design, such a ruling would completely gut Barofsky's ability to compel transparency and exercise real oversight over how Treasury is administering TARP, since it would make him subordinate to one of the very officials whose actions Congress wanted him to oversee: the Treasury Secretary's.